Monday, December 28, 2015

A Look at the Drafts Folder!

A terrible habit of mine when it comes to writing, is that I produce a lot of stuff that ends up sitting in the drafts folder forever. This blog is not the worst example of that - somerationalism has the drafts folder contain about 2/3s of the posts that I've written this far. For this blog, it's closer to 1/8.

The reason the stuff ends up sitting there is basically that I run out of ideas what to do with it, and keep it for future editing. Let's go and have a look at some of the posts that might one day come out of their dark cocoons.

I set out by actually deleting a few that are just a title without any content. Among these we find 'adverbs as verbs'. I remember thinking about moving a lot of the functionality of adverbs in European languages to more verb-like structures, but I didn't really get inspired enough to develop the idea much further. 

Another post that has an interesting concept behind it is "Details #110-#120: A Phonology (Done Right)". The title is intentionally a bit exaggerated, but it reflects my feeling that many conlangers simply do not go that deep into phonology. I don't mean to say that the phonemes and distinctions conlangers use are boring or anything - I mean to say that the descriptions simply show lack of familiarity with the kind of work that phonologists and phoneticians do. I also wanted to include some kind of reflections on writing fictional empirical research results. I think there are reasonable constraints on what makes sense in a naturalistic conlang, at least, constraints that rest on epistemological foundations. Yes, as conlangers we're the ultimate arbiter of what goes in our language, but if we want to pretend we're doing realism, we also need to at least familiarize ourselves with empiricism as it relates to language.

Needless to say, the numbers in the range for the phonology post, if it ever gets finished, have to be adjusted a bit.

Then we find A Review: Possible and Probable Languages. Probably going to be finished next year. Beyond that there's A Language Inspired by a Post at Badconlangingideas. This is a post where I keep adding ideas for a swing-dance based language. However, I have not really gotten into any depth with it yet, although my fascination for both linguistics and the lindy hop should be a fertile ground for it. I keep it around as a record-keeping thing.

Three posts on Barxaw, one from before it even had a name occur. One is a Table of Contents that links all the Barxaw posts, and sets out a main plan for new posts, essentially - a thing I probably should do with regards to my other major projects as well.

Some Ideas for Scripts. I have not posted much about scripts in general here, but that is basically a repository for ideas regarding writing systems that might germinate into a proper post some day. The sole idea in there right now basically proposes a scripts the writing or reading (or both) of which is a P-complete task.

Detail #141: Some Tweaks on Definiteness. Pretty much what it says on the label - an attempt at tweaking definiteness with regards to how it works in English. A look at definiteness in other languages. Other ideas occurred to me at the time, and so it didn't get much attention for a while.

A thing about verbal subordination in Dairwueh.

Several posts about teaching your child a conlang, with lots of sources. I am still reading research regarding first language acquisition and bilinguality, though, and making notes, so those might take a while.

That's but a sample, there's about 70 posts there.


2 comments:

  1. I'd like to see the one on definiteness

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  2. It's coming, but like always, I set the goal for what it should be like way too high and end up working on it way too long. Might take a few weeks.

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