pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
Philip Newton ([personal profile] pne) wrote in [personal profile] marnanel 2009-09-18 05:38 pm (UTC)

I will subscribe to CONLANG

Take care to use the interface at brown.edu and not, for example, YahooGroups. The list is mirrored there for historical reasons, but it's a one-way (read-only) gateway.

people who know about languages would tell me I was crazy or wrong.

People may point out that something is unusual or appears to violate a language universal, but if so, it's more likely to be for your information then because they're deriding you. They tend to be a pretty friendly bunch, in my experience.

It does help to know some linguistics jargon to understand the conversations, but some of it you may learn by watching (that's how I learned a lot of what I know about linguistics).

Offhand, I think that sloppy thinking is probably looked down on more than unusual grammatical or syntactic features -- and that conlangs that are too close to English are considered a bit less... artful, shall we say. (For example, languages where the grammar and word order is just like English, or where the author shows a conscript saying that this con-letter corresponds to "c", i.e. to an English letter rather than to a sound, implicitly implying that it can represent the same idiosyncratic range of sounds as the English letter.)

clearly nobody on a conlang list will think I'm crazy for making a conlang

Very true :)

a lot of things which actually occur in natlangs would seem unnatural if they didn't.

There's a saying about that on the list: ANADEW - A Natlang's Already Dunnit, Except Worse.

For unusual features someone has in their conlang, where someone else will say, "Actually, in Haida/Pirahã/Dyirbal, they do that, too, and even more oddly than in your conlang!"

So yes - don't worry too much.

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