Tan saloit, Florine! O jèu san el Dewrad, crajadro dela lènga draveana. I'm happy to answer your questions about Dravian: I've sent you a PM with my personal email address if you want any further information (like who I am, my linguistic and professional background etc).
1. How artificial or natural is the language?
Dravian was designed with the explicit intention of creating a language as naturalistic as possible. My aim was to create a language which would plausibly stand up as an authentic member of the Romance family. It was most emphatically
not designed as any kind of "auxiliary language".
2. What are typological characteristics and how do they relate to natural languages?
Given the design goal of naturalism, Dravian is consciously designed with reference to the typological characteristics of what Haspelmath terms
Standard Average European. Of the first twelve characteristics mentioned on that page, Dravian lacks only number 11, as pro-drop is permissible (although not typical). Of the remaining features mentioned on that page, colloquial Dravian lacks suppletion of comitative and instrumental:
cu amaicei mai vs
d'o coltèl.
However, this should not be misconstrued as stating that the grammatical typology is
solely Standard Average European. The language has its own quirks which don't obtain in (most) other European languages. For example, there are two passive auxiliaries- a stative and a dynamic- and there are a number of word order constraints and peculiarities which have knock-on effects with the distribution of tonic and atonic personal pronouns.
3. What are the goals and were they met?
As stated above: to create a language which would plausibly stand up as an authentic member of the Romance family. I would normally be far too modest to say whether I've been successful, but honestly I believe so.
4. What culture is expressed by the language and how much? Is the language part of its identity?
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by this question. Are you asking if there's an associated fictional culture, or whether the values of the language's speakers are reflected by the lexicon and grammar of the language? Or both?
5. Does it sound pretty or look pretty when written?
Of course it does, but I
am biased. There's a sound sample
here, which is a reading of the text presented
here. Would you like a personalised greeting to you class that you can play during your presentation?
6. Can you talk about ANYTHING in Dravean? Is it possible to translate every text to Dravean?
Hypothetically yes. The only limitation would be the vocabulary. While I don't currently have the words to discuss particle physics in Dravian, I have at my disposal the tools with which to coin them (in the same way that any minority European language would: calquing, borrowing or adapting "international" vocabulary).
7 How difficult is it to learn this language?
No more so than say, Italian or French.
8. If one has learned all there is to know, will this language be usable?
It already
is usable. The documentation may be incomplete, but what there is should enable most people with a reasonable familiarity with a modern Romance language to write intelligible (perhaps not entirely grammatically correct) texts.
9. Documentation: How much description is publicly accessable?
There is a work-in-progress grammar description of the language, which currently stands at 32,724 words, and an online lexicon which contains around 2500 headwords. The lexical database on my computer stands at around 3200 words at the moment. I anticipate having the fifth draft of the grammar out in late July or early August.
Links to both can be found in my sig at the bottom of this post.
10. Stability: Is the language done to the point that it isn’t changing anymore, at least not due to active designing?
Yes. What remains to be described in the grammar has already been decided upon, and these sections are mainly elaboration rather than presenting entirely new aspects of the language.
11. Grammatical complexity: possible and obligatory variation
- Allophony und -morphy and the complexity of the triggering context
- Words and constructions with limited use; und Konstruktionen mit beschränkter Verwendung; suppletion
I'm assuming that
Konstruktionen mit beschränkter Verwendung are "constructions with limited use"?
Allophony can be found on pages 2 and 4 of the grammar. Allomorphy is pervasive in the language: most significantly rhizotonic apophony in verbal inflection- see page 134 onwards.
There are a number of words with limited use, either due to being archaic or occuring only in set phrases or collocations. For example
ramanç is the reflex of Latin
rōmānīcē "in a Roman fashion", which is found only in the expression
favlar ramanç, which is equivalent to "straight talking" in English.
A fair few grammatical constructions are of limited distribution, and are often limited to dialectal or archaic use. For example, the agreement of past participles of transitive verbs with their objects is restricted to clauses with third person subjects, and is recessive in the standard dialect.
Suppletion is common in verbs, particularly the verbs
jèstro "to be" and
zèr "to go"- in both cases this suppletion is inherited from Latin. Similarly, suppletion is not unknown in nouns, particularly in gendered pairs referring to animates (
oam 'man' vs.
fèmna 'woman')
12. Corpus: What has been written in this language?
To date, excluding any contributions I've made to conversations on this board and the examples in the grammar, I have written:
- two folk tales in the language
- an incomplete translation of the Gospel of Mark
- a translation of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto
- a translation of
Le Petit Prince
- several "news" articles from the fictional country in which Dravian is spoken
- an extract from a novel
The corpus probably totals something along the lines of 20,000 words, maybe?
Thank you so much for your help in advance
Nun, tan mazlèsc! Since I've answered your questions, would you be so kind as to answer one of my own? Why Dravian? Did you choose it or was it assigned? (If so, who on earth knew enough about Dravian to assign it?)