Conlangery SHORTS 30: Revising a Grammar
George spends some time talking about his recent revisions of his Istatikii grammar, with a focus on organizing writing to serve the needs of the language and the readers. You will find the two drafts of the Istatikii consonant processes below. istatikii-phonproc-draft1 Download istatikii-phonproc-draft2 Download Script below the fold, see the history here . Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I’m making a short for this month, due to some scheduling issues for our planned episode. Before we get on with the show, I have a couple of announcements: First, we are supported entirely by our patrons over on Patreon. Part of my recent revisions mean that if you’ve pledged at $10 an above, you may already know just about what I’m going to say today, because you’ve had access to my script as I’ve been writing it for about a week prior to recording. I appreciate patrons who contribute at every level, as it helps me ensure I can keep the podcast going. Second, the Eighth Language Creation Conference will be held on the 22nd and 23rd of June at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom. If you’re going there, I’m trying to arrange for someone to run around with a recording device interviewing people for me, so look out for that. For those who won’t be there, the Language Creation Society will be streaming it live. I’ll link to some more information in the shownotes. Now, onto our topic for today: After finishing my dissertation, I took a little time to look at my grammar for Istatikii. My goal is to finish it up enough that I can present a proper “published” version before moving on to another conlang project. Life has been a bit hectic, so progress has been slow and halting, but I did manage to start some revisions, and I wanted to talk about something that came up in those revisions. My first task is to go chapter by chapter and revise what I have written. I followed a pretty classic format for a reference grammar breaking up topics into phonology, morphosyntax, etc. So, the first chapter I have set about revising is the phonology chapter. I had broken that down into sections on consonants and vowels, with each of those having sections on the phonological processes that affect them. On my reread, I noticed that the organization of the phonological processes wasn’t really working for me. The problem was mainly in the consonants, as they had a long list of changes, where vowels simply have the vowel harmony system, which is complex but contained. My consonant phonological processes were organized into three categories: assimilation, deletion, and “other”, with that “other” section containing only the final devoicing rule. This was a logical idea when I was first writing, but on a second reading it didn’t really work for me. I noticed that organizing by type of process did not aid the natural connections between processes. For instance, stop gemination and nasal deletion interact in Istatikii, because the nasals participate in gemination, and thus stop gemination can bleed nasal deletion by turning a nasal coda into an oral stop. But in the old version, those two rules were far apart, and there was just a minor reference back to stop gemination. Someone reading through might miss the connection or have to jump back and reread. There was a lot of this going on in the rules — someone would have to jump around the list to refresh their memory or see a rule that hadn’t been mentioned yet. Non-linear reading is of course going to happen in a grammar, and you do want to be sure you cross-reference between chapters and sections, but small sections should be readable linearly as well. Seeing this problem I looked at my rules and all their feeding and bleeding relationships and reorganized them in a more reader friendly manner. For Istatikii, that meant an organization based on natural classes — the stops and nasals interacted as above, and liquids had their own