Re: probably a bloody obvious question...

On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, The Gray Wizard wrote:

> > From: Yoon Ha Lee
> > Subject: probably a bloody obvious question...
> >
> > When y'all design languages, do you have a checklist or template you work
> > from?  I'm using the Language Construction Kit and Pablo Flores' pages
> > for now--I find them an easy-to-use starting point due to my lack of
> > experience.
>
> The best template for conlanging I have ever run across is Thomas Paine's
> "Describing Morphosyntax".  This text is meant for natlang field linguists
> but works as well for documenting conlangs as well.
Is it accessible to an amateur?  I have to do serious flipping through
linguistics books to see if I'm ready to learn what's in 'em yet!

> > But someday I'd like to make sort of a reader/learning grammar for
> > Chevraqis, once I have more of the syntax hammered out (I'm evolving
> > postpositions from serial-verb constructions in Aragis, which is fun but
> > exhausting), but I'm not sure what's a good way to organize it.  I've
> > seen a number of conlang pages that have grammars, but not so many that
> > have coherent learning guides with examples, exercises, maybe even
> > pictures.  Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough?
>
> Yes, learning guides are a lot more difficult IMHO.  I made an attempt at
> this for amman iar based on a number of TY texts, but the results were very
> disappointing.  I think the problem is that you have to be very comfortable
> with a language to know how to present it in a pedagogical fashion.
> Teaching a language, as it turns out is a lot more difficult than describing
> it.  I have become a lot more comfortable with amman iar since my last
> attempt at this, so perhaps I should give it another try.  Attempts to
> pattern it after other language teaching texts, however, is IMO still doomed
> to failure.  Putting together the proper sequence of grammatical description
> as well as ordering the material from simple to more complex is no easy
> chore and seemingly very different for each language.  I may attempt a
Good points.  I have some idea of how I would start, from what I know
about the grammar right now, and I *like* explaining things, so it's
something I'm keeping in mind for the future.  I'm looking at my teaching
grammars and trying to get a sense of what kinds of complexity they
introduce when--very language dependent, but better than no examples at all.

> "graded reader", however.  I can remember many years ago when I was first
> learning German using one of these quite successfully.  The object of these
> readers is to introduce new words, idioms and grammatical concepts in the
> text in easily assimilated amounts.  New words and idioms are defined in
> footnotes when first introduced, but no grammar was presented at all, the
> expectation being that the reader had a grammar reference separately
> available.  I remember being impressed with the way my reading skills
> accelerated the further I got into the reader.
I picked up one of those for German (along with _Living German_) and was
impressed by the way it worked, too.  Since I like writing anyway I may
try that...it'd be incentive to create "basic" terminology (food, people,
familial relationships, etc.) instead of the "exotic" cultural
terminology I tend to focus on for writing-background.

YHL