Offer: Fiction critique from a linguistic perspective

[ellen_fremedon]

Offer: I will read your story or novel extract of up to 20,000 words (including any notes), OR your notes alone up to 10,000 words, and provide a thorough critique from a linguistic standpoint, covering the structure of any invented languages, the linguistic history and language contact situation of your world, and the social ins-and-outs of

Comments

[jonquil]

$25.00

[ellen_fremedon]

Congratulations! You are the winner.

[jonquil]

Yaaaay! Making donation now. (And hi!)

[mojavedragonfly]

Hittite? Wow. How cool that is.

[ellen_fremedon]

:-) That one was just a single semester of Structure Of; you can't really go farther than that without learning cuneiform. But it was very, very cool.

[mojavedragonfly]

Awesome. I always wanted to be the person in the movie, who, when the group goes into the scary tomb, says, "Stand aside. That's Babylonian on the wall. I can read this."

But, cuneiform? Ouch.

[chiave_trust]

But Sanskrit is just awesome, I'll have to say. (I've been trying to see how I could learn that, which is proving to be a slight bit difficult.)

I'd bid, but I tend to use Japanese and other such languages, so I'm not sure what I'd use it for x.x

[the_shoshanna]

For a general taste of my language neepery, try this essay.

Both links go to part 1 -- what happens next?

[ellen_fremedon]

Oops. Fixed it.

[the_shoshanna]

Yay, thanks! I'm not bidding on the service, but the essay is awesome.

question! :)

[nekonexus]

I have a (first draft) finished novel, which has a conlang roughly based on Japanese. I've mostly been creating the language based on how it "sounds" in my head, but I don't want it to read like a real language when I don't know what I might be saying. ^_^;

Is cleaning up that kind of conlang something you could help with?

Re: question! :)

[ellen_fremedon]

You mean, making sure that you haven't inadvertently created meaningful utterances in some real language-- that 'surrender or die' in your conlang isn't also the Japanese for 'my hovercraft is full of eels?'

I can certainly help you make your conlang more internally consistent and unique, which should help distinguish it from other languages, but if you're worried specifically about overlaps with Japanese, I don't have the expertise to check on that-- I don't know any Japanese.

Re: question! :)

[nekonexus]

Yes - heaven forbid we should be full of eels.

The help making it internally consistent and unique would be great, and like you say, would help distinguish it.

Thanks for the clarification!