Diary 2019-12-05

By Max Woerner Chase

I was kind of worn out today, and I'm not sure why. In any case, I did some work coming up with historical details for the conlang I've been talking about, which I'm going to give the working title of The Tongue of Light. I'm basically trying to focus on the particular form that I want to work with, but occasionally noticing that it's easiest to think about certain things I want in terms of a history.

Now, in the past, when I've seen advocacy for using proto-languages in conlanging, I was usually interpreting that like "get the proto-language all set, then apply changes, and see where it ends up". That seems to me like it'd work in the context of following the story of a nation, but I never really liked trying to do that. For this project, where the idea is kind of to have a fictional moment in time where the language has a particular form, the idea of taking a more ad-hoc approach seems more appealing. Like "Okay, this bit is kind of irregular, so it ought to be derived from a more intuitive paradigm in the past, like so". I should probably figure out how best to represent a timeline of changes before I go too far, because it would be kind of awkward if I ended up needing to have a bunch of essentially unrelated changes happening all at once somehow.

Okay, that's enough writing for now.

Good night.