Re: help with starting out

nicole perrin wrote:
>
<snip>

> Yup, a lot of my langs are similar to this -- they're almost all
> agglutinating.  This may seem systematic, but probably only because
> you're used to inflecting langs.  Hungarian is also an agglutinating
> lang, but I don't know any of it, so I'll give a few similar examples
> from my Ini:
>
> Pan pamum
> P-   -a-       -n       pa   mum
> past imperfect negative have masc3pl
> "They didn't have"
>
> Kan pamum
> K-     -a-       -n       pa   mum
> future imperfect negative have masc3pl
> "They will not have"
>
> See, the first word in each sentence seems pretty systematic, but only
> because it's made of some of the same morphemes -- I think this is kinda
> nice in conlanging actually, because you have to make up and/or memorize
> way fewer morphemes (for example, in Ini there are only 13 morphemes to
> remember for these little tense/aspect/mood particles, but an inflecting
> lang might have as many as 120 completely different words expressing the
> same info).  Just my $.02
>
Since we're all spouting agglutinating Language examples, I'll give some
from my Ajuk.

Erap donapothi reno.
Er-        -ap  don-  -ap-  -oth-  -i         ren-  -o
3rd person masc come  masc. future 3rd person here  acc.
"He will come here"

Erap donapami Bostonom
Er- -ap  don- -ap-  -am- -i  Boston- -om  Kanadar- -aj
3rd masc come masc. past 3rd Boston  abl. Canada   dat.
"He came to Canada from Boston."

Er-  -ap  imbem- -ap- -am- -i  trunland-    -o   shuz         Bob- -i
3rd  masc drink  masc past 3rd orange juice acc. according to Bob  gen.
"He drank orange juice according to Bob."

I chose this system because it allowed me to save on the number of
diffferent inflections that I had to make, as Nik said. For example, I
have only 3 pronouns, which have a gender affix attached to them, while
a language like English has one for each gender in the case of "He",
"she", and "it". Also, with verbs, in Ajuk verbs have a regular series
of affixes in a regular ordre, rather than having a different form for
each tense, and a different ending for each person, etc. An andvantage
of agglutinating langs, if your inflecting lang seems to have to
artificial a form of inflections, is that agglutinating langs usually do
have fairly regular systems of affixes, and thus a fully regular system
won't seem as out of place and unnatural.

Also, check out Mark Rosenfelder's Language Creation kit, at
http://www.zompist.com/kit.html. It doesnt cover everything you need to
make a language, but it covers enough to get you started, and by the
time you've read through it and come up with your own ways of doing the
various things he describes, you'll have enough of a structure to figure
out how to do most other things. Also, this list is a very good resource
if you ever get stuck, there'll always be someone out there who can help
you.

--
Robert