During September, I had 13-ish strong days of work on my conlang. Even with all of that work, it feels like I have so little to show. I’m mulling over the idea of making more regular posts that talk about what I’m working on instead of just what I’ve finished.
I merged my possessive/genitive particle with my complementizer/agentive particle, but I later undid that as it led to some weird ambiguity. Confusing “dog of friend eats” and “dog that friend eats” is too weird to ignore.
Concerning Hamming distance, I had a little revelation. If «mun» and «lun» are different enough, shouldn’t «num» and «nul» be different enough? Thus, the idea that a syllable could have the same initial consonant and vowel so long as one ended in «l» and one ended in «m» was born. I haven’t really used this yet, but it’s a neat little observation.
There was a bunch of time spent trying to figure out what the words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ should sound like.
Numerals also broke a bit.
I played around with syntax and ambiguity a ton. It seems like there isn’t an easy/simple way for me to get the effect that I want, which is fine. It’s hard to disambiguate something like ‘American history teacher’ (without adding complex rules). Is it a teacher of American history? Or is it a history teacher that’s American? We may never know.
My favorite part was relearning Lojban basics while discovering some “ancient” conlangs from the listserv era.
A whole month has gone by without me figuring out monosyllabic words. After the first two weeks, this was very frustrating, and I felt defeated. Eventually, I cried it out, shrugged my shoulders, and changed my focus so I didn’t burn myself out. It’s okay to have not figured them out! As of today, I’m dipping my toes back in, and it feels so good to go back into it with a fresh mindset. That’s the trick—I just have to remind myself of that. Sometimes, a tactical withdrawal is the best move, even if it feels like a loss—because it’s not a loss. Throwing myself at the same topic again and again as I become more frustrated and burnt out, leading to such a big loss of time is just that: a loss.
There are times to push through, of course. It’s just about finding that balance, and there’s also meta-balance, finding the balance of finding balance. Maybe pushing through will lead to frustration and a week’s worth of setback compared to dropping it to work on something else. I might have some setback on the dropped topic because I lose my place, but I get to move forward with something else. Plus, losing my place, as I said, can be refreshing. Then, the meta-balance is figuring out how much of a setback I’m taking by spending time to find a balance. Sometimes, if it’s complex or I find myself teetering back and forth a ton, it’s just best to take the safe option to let myself breathe.
If I keep going, I’ll have written more about my working philosophy than I have about my actual conlang. I hope to post again soon!
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