Does your conlang satisfy you?

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TeutonicMice
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Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by TeutonicMice »

I was wondering if other people were as unsatisfied with there conlang as myself. Sometimes I feel as though Beljun is too minimalistic or unnatural, it's difficult to really say. I would appreciate any feedback on what you feel needs work in your language/s, or on how you go about revising a constructed language.
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ian9113
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by ian9113 »

Most of the time, I am satisfied with Adranik. Sometimes I wish it was a bit more complex or less SAE in certain areas. I also really wish I had implemented a vowel harmony system earlier in its development, now it is literally screaming for one. In fact, the "non-existant" vowel harmony has begun to surface in some things... e.g. certain declensions of nouns, conjugations of verbs keeping their suffixes and what not in harmony with the vowel. This is usually a coincidence rather than intentional, though. :wat:

As far as revisions go... well I have recently developed a new verb system for Adranik, because the verbs were really just not what I wanted. It looks good on paper, but I haven't implemented the new system yet. It would probably involve a lot of work and cleaning-up of old examples to get it to where I want.

But yeah, I am generally satisfied. If I included everything I wanted, the language would not be what I wanted at all, so you have to pick and choose.
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TeutonicMice
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by TeutonicMice »

I've thought about revising, but as you said once you get to a certain point in its grammar and or lexicon it becomes very difficult. I also think I am the sort of person that will never be completely content with anything creative, I'm sure a lot of the people on this forum are like that.
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Pirka
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Pirka »

No, I'm never satisfied. Usually my dissatisfaction leads to me just stop working on a project, all while hating its guts and wishing I could be better at conlanging.

But I come crawling back to the language on my knees every time.
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Prinsessa »

My tendency is to be greatly satisfied as I come up with some new, awesome idea, or when just starting out with a fresh base, only to grow less satisfied as I go along, and my rules start feeling clumsy and no longer perfectly suited together.
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Celinceithir
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Celinceithir »

Yes, I'm nearly entirely satisfied by my language. It is far from perfect, but designedly so; what naturalistic language would be perfect? After a decade, this year, of developing it, I still enjoy communicating in and adding to the language. The problem is now that I get ideas for other languages that intrigue me for a period of time, but I quickly demotivated because I feel that they cannot compare with my main constructed language in terms of their depth and their emotional resonance with me.
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Iron
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Iron »

No. I almost never manage to construct one that does. I like it at first, but then it slowly wears off until it seems boring.
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Batailleur
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Batailleur »

Iron wrote:No. I almost never manage to construct one that does. I like it at first, but then it slowly wears off until it seems boring.
This. [+1]
ILR 5 = :eng:
ILR 4 = :rus:
ILR 3 = None
ILR 2 = :fra:
ILR 1 = None
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by kiwikami »

Iron wrote:No. I almost never manage to construct one that does. I like it at first, but then it slowly wears off until it seems boring.
For the most part, this is true for me as well.

Culphecc Glyw is turning out exactly how I wanted it to, but it's the only one, really. Eveleranil was awesome, in my mind, for a while, but then I started to realize just how English-y it had gotten - far more so than I wanted. Genljong... well, that one worked out, but it got boring. And I hate HyPry. I really do. I hate its orthography, I hate its phonology, I hate its verbs and its tenses and its thirty-nine noun classes and 70+ cases and... well, pretty much everything about it. But, like Pirka said, I keep crawling back to it on my knees. And I've always been rather set against revising a conlang - once I have a new idea for it, I might mess around with it later, but for the most part, I leave that idea to stew for a while and interact with everything else. I like watching my conlangs evolve on their own, and too bad for me if it doesn't work out in the end.

My conlangs never entirely satisfy me, but I keep working on them anyway because of those glorious moments when things just sort of click together. Every so often, I look at something I've just done, some idea I've just had, and I think "Oh, that makes sense! I'm loving this!" And just for a split second, I really am loving it. I think that's the only think keeping me from being bored out of my mind with the 'langs I have so far. I'm still discovering new little things about them, new quirks that just spring up from the interaction of everything I've thrown into them. Apparently "A tree regretfully sighs" is a palindrome in HyPry: Ʒu pat'eŋ pı ŋe' Tapuʒ. Who knew?
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.

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Trailsend
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Trailsend »

Yes and no.

I'm tremendously happy with Feayran. I love working with it. At the same time, though, it's definitely not finished. There's always been at least one area where I really wanted to improve it; at the moment it's diachronics, so I'm reading up on historical linguistics and working on creating the language's evolutionary story. Once I'm done with that, there will be something else to attract my attention. So, I'm always simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied.
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Lambuzhao »

TeutonicMice wrote: I would appreciate any feedback on what you feel needs work in your language/s, or on how you go about revising a constructed language.
Revise?! Anathema!!!!

I developed a conworld for my conlangs aeons ago. I have made only a handful of earth-shaking revisions to my big three:
Iveriki, Rozwi, and Sadrås. The revisions to Iveriki spawned another conlang - Gavik. The revisions to Rozwi I linked heavily to conhistorical events, so that, looking backward, different layers of language developed (Old Tsarak, Classical Rozwi, Rozwi of the Ekhoeri Hegemony). As for Sadrås, they just sort of reabsorbed into and became part of the main language.

Anymore, more drastic changes get relegated to another new, work-in-progress sister-lang to one of the above.

I think, with any art or craft, patience needs to happen. These are works that, if they were natural, would have had centuries of existence to get beat up, knocked around, and produce some fine literary examples (prose, poetry, sacred, song, etc). We have to bear that in mind before we throw the :con: out with the bathwater.

Like Kiwikami suggested, those serenditpitous pearls are worth more than any diamond. It takes a lot of work, blood, sweat, tears, spit, gall, bile; but after all, we are singlehandedly doing the work of generations.

My conlangs work for me. As they ought to? ooooh, now that's a slippery slope. They function as they need to.
And I make them work for me.

After all, the best polish for silverware (and :con: 's) is use.
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H.Á.
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by H.Á. »

Overall I would say yes, I keep improving details here and there because I'm a notorious perfectionist though.
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Valosken
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Valosken »

I have been endlessly dissatisfied with everything until recently, really. Slowly but surely, over three years, I seem to have refined it so much that it's nearing satisfactory. Perfectionism is not fun. :P
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Zontas
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Zontas »

No.
Hey there.
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Ànradh
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Ànradh »

Yup, but that's to be expected given the way I'm deliberatley stopping myself from simply making a language full of features I like and instead applying rules to keep it naturalistic, so there are always things I'd like to change but know I shouldn't*.

*Obviously, the only person saying that I shouldn't is myself, but the point stands.


I'm going to revise my answer to 'no, never'.
Last edited by Ànradh on 26 Nov 2015 19:28, edited 1 time in total.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Yes... but also no.

The most satisfying part for me is when I perfect the script. And in some ways, everything is downhill from there. However, I have been trying really hard to keep working after that initial glow of creation has worn off. And, surprisingly, it has been pretty awesome.

However, that MIGHT be because I have decided to work on a somewhat logographic script that... really... won't ever be done. So maybe I am cheating. [:)]
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MrKrov
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by MrKrov »

They never fully do, but the way I've implemented bits and pieces sometimes does.
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Zontas
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Zontas »

It tries to, but all it does is just stick it in and then attack at will like it's tenderizing a steak in there. Also, it should take the hint and stop staying in one place the entire time.

The fact that it's only 5 inches long just makes matters worse.
Last edited by Zontas on 04 Feb 2013 17:37, edited 2 times in total.
Hey there.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Helios wrote:It tries to, but all it does is just stick it in and then attack at will like it's tenderizing a steak in there. Also, it should take the hint and stop staying in one place the entire time.

The fact that it's only 5 inches long makes just makes matters worse.
...

Are you... are you saying...?

Your conlang is a penis?!
Last edited by Thrice Xandvii on 21 Jan 2013 19:27, edited 1 time in total.
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Omzinesý
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Re: Does your conlang satisfy you?

Post by Omzinesý »

Kàhicáli phonology is wonderful (though I still straggle with nuances). Morphology would be very good, if I found patience to make it to what I want. But I'm very unsatisfied with the syntax. It's just words following each other. There is no structure. That's often the problem with polysynthetic langs. You concentrate on expressing everything with morphology and the syntax stays empty. It's very difficult to create the biggest part of grammar afterwards.
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