LCK Two

[Ser]

Doesn't that already exist though?

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Major-Lang ... 0195065115

[zompist]

I don't think full sketches would be a great idea, but I do plan some sections examining some interesting natlang features.

Radius, Caboodle is very clever.

[Bedelato]

There are a couple of new tools to talk about, such as my vocabulary generation tool Gen, and the Visual SCA. (Which doesn’t exist yet, but would be a complete update of the SCA, handling things like transposition, management of your phoneme inventory, and highlighting changes between runs.)

About time! That decade-old chunk of code has been in need of attention for a while now. I'll look forward to it!
And I wanna know more about this Gen thing.

[Bristel]

There are a couple of new tools to talk about, such as my vocabulary generation tool Gen, and the Visual SCA. (Which doesn’t exist yet, but would be a complete update of the SCA, handling things like transposition, management of your phoneme inventory, and highlighting changes between runs.)

About time! That decade-old chunk of code has been in need of attention for a while now. I'll look forward to it!
And I wanna know more about this Gen thing.

And please make it Mac Universal compatible... thank you

[Radius Solis]

Now that I've refreshed myself on what's in the LCK, I do have some thoughts on topics that were terribly under-covered.

1. Aspect. Aspect is the #2 grammatical category most frequently marked on verbs (after voice), and it gets only a page and a half in the LCK that do not even mention many common aspectual distinctions like active-stative and dynamic-static, the latter of which you had pulled out of the aspect section into the "other possibilities" list for some unstated reason. Lots of languages have some grammaticalization of one type or the other, not just Semitic. And second, your treatment of perfectives and perfects and the "imperfect" (which is only Romance-ese for past+imperfective - and you didn't even mention the imperfective itself!) did not identify the difference between them, and confused one or both of them with the notion of completion. I can't even tell if it's one or both - the text is that unclear. FWIW the perfect, the perfective, and the completive are fully contrastible aspects, and conflation of one with another, as in Romance, is on a language-specific basis. Other languages leave all three distinct, as in English (though we don't really grammaticalize the completive):

[-perfect]
I ate it. [+perfective -completive]
I was eating it. [-perfective -completive]
I ate it all. [+perfective +completive]
I was eating it all. [-perfective +completive]

[+perfect]
I've eaten it. [+perfective -completive]
I've been eating it. [-perfective -completive]
I've eaten it all. [+perfective +completive]
I've been eating it all. [-perfective +completive]

Not to mention there are numerous other aspects that occasionally show up in natlangs, like iterative and semelfactive and punctual/momentane and a host of others that more advanced conlangers should know... if all the aspect possibilities I knew of were the ones in the LCK, I would find it a boring category! Some languages make really fine-grained distinctions like between completive (stopping at a natural endpoint) versus terminative (just stopping, anywhere) or inceptive (starting an action) versus inchoative (the coming into being of a state), and there's so much interesting stuff that can be done in this realm. So a major expansion of the aspect section including a clarification of the whole perfective/perfect/imperfective mess would be highly desirable.


2. The LCK talks about fusion, agglutination, and isolation as though they were types of languages, rather than types of morpheme behaviors any or all of which can be present in any given language. This is like putting training wheels on a tricycle. Can we get the ten-speed now, please? In particular it'd be great if you went into some detail - even a chapter's worth! - about the grammaticalization "conveyor belt" that so often takes morphemes along a path that goes: isolation (compositional) > particles and periphrastic constructions > agglutination > fusion > stem changes > loss of marking. Languages like Chinese in which the conveyor belt is not much in evidence are few and far between, and it's such an important thing to understand when diachronically deriving languages.

3. Grammatical voice. The great majority of languages have at least some morphological manifestation of voice or valence on the verb. But it doesn't get so much as a section to itself in the LCK! Just passing mentions of the passive in discussions of other things, plus throwing reflexives and causatives in with the types of transitivity. But if an "advance langauge construction" reader can't come out of the end of the book able to understand what a passivized reflexive applicative would look like**, they have not been educated about voice as well as a conlanger should be.

** The field was overflown by itself

4. Deixis! There's hardly anything about it in the LCK, and so much that can be done. Verbs with spatial deixis (actually pretty common, cross-linguistically), demonstratives with both spatial and temporal deixis (separate single words for "that-thing-then" and "that-thing-now"), and even just how the deictic center moves around depending on what you say. This ties in to aspect too, e.g. the pluperfect is identical to the perfect but with the deictic center shifted back in time. Now here's an interesting question... complete this SAT-style analogy. TEMPORAL DEIXIS (TENSE) : ASPECT :: SPATIAL DEIXIS : ???. I do not know for sure that any natlangs have spatial equivalents of aspect, but I've put it in a conlang (Dimana Lokud), which marks a spatial equivalent of the perfect: a distal event with proximal relevance. And it's conceivable that the distributives and collectives found in some natlangs (usually in the system for grammatical number) could be better understood as spatial equivalents of imperfectives and perfectives.





Lastly... what would you think about putting the essay submissions you received in the back of the book as a kind of appendix? Especially if you can get one or two more. I mean my Athabaskan essay is already sitting here half written (some two thousand words), and it's true I did drop the ball on this when it started looking like the essay collection wouldn't happen, but if there's a place for it to go I can pick the ball back up. If that were to happen then you could drop the aspect revisit because I could easily take care of it in the course of talking about Athabaskan, the family famous for having dozens of fussy little marked aspects. That was going to be a major section of the essay anyway.

[prettydragoon]

The other pun titles are momentarily amusing, but what this is really crying out to be called is The Language Construction Caboodle.

Yes indeed. 'Tis a far, far better thing than, say, Language Construction Kit 2: Electric Boogaloo.

[alice]

The other pun titles are momentarily amusing, but what this is really crying out to be called is The Language Construction Caboodle.

Yes indeed. 'Tis a far, far better thing than, say, Language Construction Kit 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Or Language Construction Kit 2: Wrath of the Dragon God.

[Herr Dunkel]

Dialects and monster raving loonies (Transitive-Intransitive MSA)

[dhok]

Still, it might be worth asking somebody on the board to write up a 20-page description of a natlang that's really different- just one. Navajo could be a good choice. So might a Bantu language or an Australian one.

[Gulliver]

I'm going to confess that I got about halfway through and not-too-shabby essay on number that I was going to submit, complete with conlang examples, but then life intervened and I abandoned it.

[alice]

Another, rather small, topic which might be worth considering: Celtic-style initial mutations, something similar to which is also found in Nivkh, and something not completely different in Fulani.

[Miiil]

The other pun titles are momentarily amusing, but what this is really crying out to be called is The Language Construction Caboodle.

Yes indeed. 'Tis a far, far better thing than, say, Language Construction Kit 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Or Language Construction Kit 2: Wrath of the Dragon God.

The Conlang and The Deathly Hallows
Pushing Your Language to the Edge

[Herr Dunkel]

LCK 3: Electric Boogaloo: Electric Boogaloo

Since the first LCK was the online one.

[Yng]

Another, rather small, topic which might be worth considering: Celtic-style initial mutations, something similar to which is also found in Nivkh, and something not completely different in Fulani.

Booooriiing

Or at least, not interesting enough to warrant a mention on its own warrants. Discussion of that sort of stem change more generally though (ablaut, umlaut, final voicing etc) would be much more worthwhile.

[Bristel]

Another, rather small, topic which might be worth considering: Celtic-style initial mutations, something similar to which is also found in Nivkh, and something not completely different in Fulani.

Booooriiing

Or at least, not interesting enough to warrant a mention on its own warrants. Discussion of that sort of stem change more generally though (ablaut, umlaut, final voicing etc) would be much more worthwhile.

Your idea is just as boring.

No, I kid, I'd love a section on those kinds of alterations in general, and details as well.

[Chargone]

one of several things I've always had trouble with is figuring out how the heck to lay out the grammar of my con lang logically so i can actually find things again. how things should be grouped and organised and such. the example in the back of the LCK was of limited utility for this, as, obviously, it only included the features it Actually Had, not all the other ones i could (and have) included, and such. (also it was hard to tell the heading fonts apart so i was often unsure what things were meant to be subsections of the ones before and what were meant to be new sections.

ideally this should assume the user is writing it out by hand on paper not all of us know enough of the relevant things to set up HTML pages (let alone more complex methods) for it and such, and even then still would need to plan out what we were doing.

i'm sure there's other things, but that was what came to mind immediately.

(the other problem i often have is figuring out just what the hell English is actually doing in a given situation so i can pull it apart and figure out quite what my language needs to do to express the same concept. unfortunately, my memorization skills are poor so i've never managed to learn another language even at class room level, despite a couple of attempts. not sure if this can be generalised enough to be a useful topic though.)

[So Haleza Grise]

Something I thought of might be where to go to get cheap/accessible natlang resources: e.g. not all conlangers are going to have the financial resources to shell out for good-quality dictionaries or grammars of dozens of languages.

[Chargone]

Something I thought of might be where to go to get cheap/accessible natlang resources: e.g. not all conlangers are going to have the financial resources to shell out for good-quality dictionaries or grammars of dozens of languages.

heck, even trying to FIND grammars is a bit of a mission in and of itself, it seems. let alone affordable ones.

[Wattmann]

Something I thought of might be where to go to get cheap/accessible natlang resources: e.g. not all conlangers are going to have the financial resources to shell out for good-quality dictionaries or grammars of dozens of languages.

heck, even trying to FIND grammars is a bit of a mission in and of itself, it seems. let alone affordable ones.

There are things such as affordable grammars??
WHAT YEAR IS THIS?

[Astraios]

My Maltese one cost a penny (plus £1.70 for postage).

[sirred]

My library card was free. Of course, it has only about four or five grammars, discounting ILL.

[Wattmann]

My library charges 3.90 euros per book that I check out, and it applies only to me =(

[Astraios]

... Why?

[Wattmann]

... Why?

I don't know
Didn't steal anything, never mugged nor killed anyone there, never used cellphones in library...

[Halian]

(scrapped)