Re: Informants, etc.

Arthaey Angosii wrote:

> What this all boils down to is many of you have informants, and I want one
> too.  :P  Seriously(?) though, does people have other, erm, "methods" of
> learning/discovering their conlangs, besides the informant-route?  I think
> I've seen people mention discovering historical documents and thus learning
> conlang/conculture that way.  Any other means?
The problem with informants/consultants is that you can't really ask them right
out "what degrees of comparison are there in Piata?". You have to
listen to real spoken sentences first, and *then* analyze them. At
least that's how I do it with Piata. My informant isn't a linguist by far.
None of the Piata are. He's a nice chap though. :)

Perhaps this is why conlangs change constantly. Because we have
to change the analysis of the language all the time. :)

Daniel Andreasson