Thursday, August 2, 2007

Wrestling with the passive and other design considerations

For several days I wrestled with the question of how (or if) I wanted to do the passive for TN. I eventually settled on a verb prefix. I don't feel like this is all that interesting as a solution, but it is functional. I am actually pretty happy with the way it sounds, in practice.

TN incorporates a lot of features that were in various conlang doodles (not even sketches) that I'd come up with over the last few years. I am trying to keep a grip on what goes into it, though. It is not my goal to include every interesting feature I can think of. It is my goal to create something functional, learnable, and aesthetically pleasing (to my personal tastes). It would be really easy to come down with Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Syndrome, but I don't think that would be a very good design choice, given my purpose.

I think the grammar is complete enough to allow me to get started translating and writing. I need to make sure all the vocabulary is getting documented as it is being invented. As it is, I believe I have some words used in the grammar that aren't in the dictionary yet. I just want to try to keep things as consistent as possible across the board through good documentation.

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