Senior Project Reflection #1
So I started my senior project this week. I'm working intensively on my conlang, Tlharithad, and so far I'm making good progress. I've made up about as much grammar and vocab this week as I did all of September and October when I first began this language. (Yay for increased cosmic background linguistics knowledge.) I've thrown out some of the less workable ideas from Tlharithad's egg stage, and I think I can declare it to be safely into the larval stage. (No, it's nowhere near pupating yet, no matter how impressed my lay peers are with it.) It's coming out interestingly, though I'm a little afraid that it won't have any consistent overarching design principles, and will instead end up largely a mishmash of my favorite features from natural languages. Describing Morphosyntax could help fix that, if only I could bring myself to build-along with it in the order that things are presented, instead of jumping around all over the place.
Working on a senior project is a pretty sweet deal. We attend only our AP classes, and once those are over we don't have to attend any classes at all. We also don't take finals. So there's a whole lot of unstructured free time to work on the project. I'm lucky that I chose a project that's highly portable and that I can do in short chunks or long chunks. Some of my friends are doing projects that require them to go places during certain hours. Even to SF, which is pretty far from Menlo. Because Menlo has got a rotating schedule, the classes you have to attend aren't at the same time each day. It can be highly inconvenient. I'm just lucky; I was this close to being suckered into continuing my Biotech internship for a senior project, and that would have been a Very Bad Idea.
As part of our senior projects, we are required to do a reflection twice weekly. Inspired by maniacskatergrl, I will start posting these on here.
[This was originally written to be submitted to my faculty mentor. He knows a lot of context y'all won't know, and y'all know a lot of context he won't know. So contextualizing comments for y'all go in brackets, and forgive the time spent explaining obvious things to him.]
Over the weekend, I was nervous about actually starting my project, however much I had spent the previous months looking forward to the abstract idea of spending a month conlanging. I didn't actually do any conlanging over the weekend, just procrastinated and did homework. But on Monday, when I sat down and started working things out, I felt like I was back in the zone. I could sit back and let ideas flow, and whenever the flow stemmed, I could do something easy like write example sentences until my brain got unstuck and found a new issue to latch onto.
[In March, we're required to write a proposal outlining what we plan to do in our senior project. Part of this is a very detailed (and very very tentative) calendar of exactly what we plan to do each day.] When I was writing my calendar, I blocked out specific blocks of time for certain activities related to conlanging. I would spend time reading this book, working on this issue, developing this aspect of my conlang. So far, my experience hasn't been like that. I'll start out with a specific item in mind, and while I'm dealing with it I'll find a couple other side issues that should be worked out, and those will lead to yet more. Sometimes I find myself trying to remember a long daisy chain that threads through every aspect of my conlang, from sounds to writing to grammar to usage. At least at this stage of development, it's very stream of consciousness. I think that as time goes by and as I fill in more of the blank space, the branching daisy chain effect will decrease and I'll be able to focus on single areas without having ten other issues pop up.
I've pretty much decided on the orthography ("spelling system") for Tlharithad. It has some unusual sounds that don't occur in English: one that's sort of like the French gargled R, and one that's like the modified sound of H in "human" or "hue". Those are spelled < rh > and < hy > respectively. I was debating using lots of digraphs (two-letter combinations) versus using accented letters, but digraphs won out because they're so much easier to type, and because there really aren't good accented characters available to indicate th and dh (the "th"-sounds in "thin" and "the").
I feel kind of guilty for introducing the letter < y > for just one digraph, when I could have just as well used < ch > or a lone < h > for that sound. But < hy > has some major advantages. It's more intuitive and less likely to be mangled by J. Random English Speaker. People would read < h > as h. And < ch > recalls the German "kkhhh" sound very strongly. < hy > may not be the prettiest digraph in the world, but it's intuitive, and I value that greatly.
One thing that's bothering me is that I haven't really kicked into gear on the Describing Morphosyntax build-along part of my project yet. That will have to be the main component of my project, since I have done out the sounds and spelling of Tlharithad and the grammar is next in line. I have no hopes of finishing the buildalong, just because of time constraints, but I want to get a decent distance along. So far, I have no idea what speed I can go at because I haven't really started.
Then again, like I said in my proposal, this project will never really be "finished". I will not be able to make Tlharithad big enough to be useful in lots of everyday contexts, just because one month is not long enough. And even if I finish going through Describing Morphosyntax and I do a complete rough sketch of the language, I can always go back over it with finer and finer pens. In fact, I plan to keep working on this language in the long term.
Today I received the first of three books I'm getting from Amazon: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed., David Crystal. I've wanted this particular book for about two years, ever since Doug Ball briefly loaned me his copy. (Doug is a Stanford linguistics grad student and a fellow conlanger. While I was interning at Stanford two summers ago, he spent time with me discussing random interesting bits of linguistics as they related to conlanging.) It's an excellent all-around resource and very readable. I'm hoping that it will help me work my way through Describing Morphosyntax, which is dense and frequently refers to things I've never heard of or don't remember. Of course, there are whole sections of the Cambridge that I don't need, but I'll read them eventually, purely out of interest.
I'm really looking forward to when the other two books arrive. I ordered Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, which gives enough of fifty languages to sink your teeth into. I'll definitely be skimming it for interesting constructions and strategies to steal adapt for Tlharithad. The other book is George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It's a fascinating book about how things are categorized in the mind, and how this is reflected in language. It may not prove all that useful for my senior project per se, but I've wanted this book for quite some time, and I had an Amazon gift certificate to use up.
Working on a senior project is a pretty sweet deal. We attend only our AP classes, and once those are over we don't have to attend any classes at all. We also don't take finals. So there's a whole lot of unstructured free time to work on the project. I'm lucky that I chose a project that's highly portable and that I can do in short chunks or long chunks. Some of my friends are doing projects that require them to go places during certain hours. Even to SF, which is pretty far from Menlo. Because Menlo has got a rotating schedule, the classes you have to attend aren't at the same time each day. It can be highly inconvenient. I'm just lucky; I was this close to being suckered into continuing my Biotech internship for a senior project, and that would have been a Very Bad Idea.
As part of our senior projects, we are required to do a reflection twice weekly. Inspired by maniacskatergrl, I will start posting these on here.
[This was originally written to be submitted to my faculty mentor. He knows a lot of context y'all won't know, and y'all know a lot of context he won't know. So contextualizing comments for y'all go in brackets, and forgive the time spent explaining obvious things to him.]
Over the weekend, I was nervous about actually starting my project, however much I had spent the previous months looking forward to the abstract idea of spending a month conlanging. I didn't actually do any conlanging over the weekend, just procrastinated and did homework. But on Monday, when I sat down and started working things out, I felt like I was back in the zone. I could sit back and let ideas flow, and whenever the flow stemmed, I could do something easy like write example sentences until my brain got unstuck and found a new issue to latch onto.
[In March, we're required to write a proposal outlining what we plan to do in our senior project. Part of this is a very detailed (and very very tentative) calendar of exactly what we plan to do each day.] When I was writing my calendar, I blocked out specific blocks of time for certain activities related to conlanging. I would spend time reading this book, working on this issue, developing this aspect of my conlang. So far, my experience hasn't been like that. I'll start out with a specific item in mind, and while I'm dealing with it I'll find a couple other side issues that should be worked out, and those will lead to yet more. Sometimes I find myself trying to remember a long daisy chain that threads through every aspect of my conlang, from sounds to writing to grammar to usage. At least at this stage of development, it's very stream of consciousness. I think that as time goes by and as I fill in more of the blank space, the branching daisy chain effect will decrease and I'll be able to focus on single areas without having ten other issues pop up.
I've pretty much decided on the orthography ("spelling system") for Tlharithad. It has some unusual sounds that don't occur in English: one that's sort of like the French gargled R, and one that's like the modified sound of H in "human" or "hue". Those are spelled < rh > and < hy > respectively. I was debating using lots of digraphs (two-letter combinations) versus using accented letters, but digraphs won out because they're so much easier to type, and because there really aren't good accented characters available to indicate th and dh (the "th"-sounds in "thin" and "the").
I feel kind of guilty for introducing the letter < y > for just one digraph, when I could have just as well used < ch > or a lone < h > for that sound. But < hy > has some major advantages. It's more intuitive and less likely to be mangled by J. Random English Speaker. People would read < h > as h. And < ch > recalls the German "kkhhh" sound very strongly. < hy > may not be the prettiest digraph in the world, but it's intuitive, and I value that greatly.
One thing that's bothering me is that I haven't really kicked into gear on the Describing Morphosyntax build-along part of my project yet. That will have to be the main component of my project, since I have done out the sounds and spelling of Tlharithad and the grammar is next in line. I have no hopes of finishing the buildalong, just because of time constraints, but I want to get a decent distance along. So far, I have no idea what speed I can go at because I haven't really started.
Then again, like I said in my proposal, this project will never really be "finished". I will not be able to make Tlharithad big enough to be useful in lots of everyday contexts, just because one month is not long enough. And even if I finish going through Describing Morphosyntax and I do a complete rough sketch of the language, I can always go back over it with finer and finer pens. In fact, I plan to keep working on this language in the long term.
Today I received the first of three books I'm getting from Amazon: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed., David Crystal. I've wanted this particular book for about two years, ever since Doug Ball briefly loaned me his copy. (Doug is a Stanford linguistics grad student and a fellow conlanger. While I was interning at Stanford two summers ago, he spent time with me discussing random interesting bits of linguistics as they related to conlanging.) It's an excellent all-around resource and very readable. I'm hoping that it will help me work my way through Describing Morphosyntax, which is dense and frequently refers to things I've never heard of or don't remember. Of course, there are whole sections of the Cambridge that I don't need, but I'll read them eventually, purely out of interest.
I'm really looking forward to when the other two books arrive. I ordered Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, which gives enough of fifty languages to sink your teeth into. I'll definitely be skimming it for interesting constructions and strategies to steal adapt for Tlharithad. The other book is George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It's a fascinating book about how things are categorized in the mind, and how this is reflected in language. It may not prove all that useful for my senior project per se, but I've wanted this book for quite some time, and I had an Amazon gift certificate to use up.