The BG Language Creation Guide
#4: First Collaboration
Now that you have your basic cultural outline, segments and a first set of words in hand, it is time for some consultation. Please bring printouts of your first three assignments or bring a laptop on which you can show these to your partner. You and your partner should: - Describe your cultures to one another.
- Explain your segment inventory with particular attention to anything that is unusual or that you particularly like.
- Help your partner verify that s/he is using phonetic transcription correctly and that s/he has easily typable equivalents for all of the segments.
- As you look at one another's words, be sure that hyphens are being used to correctly separate morphemes.
- Show each other your inflectional nominal morphology and make sure you understand one another's systems for inflection for noun class (if applicable), number and possession and how these combine. Verify the presence of a negation marker.
- Look over one another's list of words, pointing out ones you particularly like. Be sure to note polysemy and homonyms.
- Make any comments or suggestions to your partner that occur to you.
- Taking into account the segment inventory, phonotactics, morphological limitations (if any), noun classes (if any) and the cultural description your partner has created, create five new nouns to add to his or her language. You may do this by inventing entire new words or by combining morphemes that already exist in that language. Not e you may not simply give your partner words from your language to use.
Important: If the two of you have trouble with any of this, bring it to my attention in class, and I'll help you proceed. After class, please cut and paste the following into an email to your partner and cc me.
Note that the purpose of this assignment is to help one another. I have seen all of the papers already. Nothing you say will in anyway hurt your partner's grade. I expect you each to do a thorough and professional job and give your partner information which will help him or her improve the created language.
Feedback from First Language Collaboration
- From: your name
- To: partner's name
- Creator of: Partner's Language Name:
- Brief description of the culture in which this language is spoken.
- You are using technical linguistic vocabulary consistently such as: inflectional, morpheme, prefix, suffix, derivational. (note places to make changes).
- The tone of the documentation is objective and professional rather than conversational. (Try to give specific suggestions.)
- Two ways in which your segment inventory differs from mine.
- You are using phonetic transcription with typable equivalents and I find place manner and voicing designations for your segments:
- Your maximum syllable is: _____
- Noun Classes:
- Number of classes?
- Way these are marked
- Semantic motivation (if any) for nouns being in a particular class.
- Suggested changes
- You mark number in this way: (specify)
<
- You mark possessives in this way (specify)
- You negate nouns in this way:
- The case(s) of polysemy in your language are:
- The case(s) of homonymy used in your language is/are:
- The noun you made that I wish I had is:
- A check for ungrammatical forms and presentation errors:
- Any nouns which use a segment not allowed by the phonetic description of the language--specify
- Any problems with how nouns are transcribed in the word list such as use of English orthographic conventions rather than phonetic transcription--specify
- Any words you find which violate maximum syllable--specify
- Any errors in the use of hyphens to separate morphemes--specify
- Here are the five words I made for you with their glosses and translations:
- Translations: Using your partner's grammatical system and lexical items, translate these words and phrases into his or her language. Note that we have no equivalent for "the" at present. You may ignore that for now.
- I translate "people" as ""
- I translate "the woman's forest" as ""
- I translate "the men's stars" as ""
- I translate "tree's branches" as ""
- I translate shamans' story" as ""
Where would you like to go??
Top of this Page?
BGSU Language Creation Homepage?
English 290
English 615
Someplace Else Interesting such as:
(I'm open to suggestions: who can find me some fabulous marginally-relevant link to put here?)
Updated 2/27/2008