The cycle of revisions I've been working on in the last year and a half or so is winding down to a fixed set of features that I really like. But I have found there's one thing I've had a hard time giving up: case marking. A hefty chunk of what I'm aiming for is inspired by various areal features of North American native languages, where case marking (and dependency marking in general) is not exactly common.
Removing cases gives me deep anxieties, even though I know intellectually a language is perfectly capable of working fine without them, even if you have a nonconfigurational syntax. I spent part of today working through the behavior of applicatives, and have finally reassured myself multiple objects without overt marking can work just fine. Thinking about reasonable discourse situations, rather than concocted grammar puzzles of the sort one finds in old Latin textbooks, is a better guide to where real ambiguities can arise.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Artistic and Personal Mapmaking
General Semantics is a philosophical movement with self-help overtones that had its heyday in the 1950s. It had impacts in a few areas, inc...
-
Is text. End of post. Ok, it's not quite that simple. You probably want some sort of structured text, semantically marked up if pos...
-
I was hired in 2021 to create two languages for the film "Black Adam," one for timeline-hopping wizards (called the Language of Et...
-
One common set of questions in conlanging forums is about how to organize the material, the grammar, the dictionary, lessons, etc. While th...