Renovation Language Creation Workshop Materials

To everyone that participated in the Language Creation Workshop at Renovation, thanks so much for attending! For those that stuck it out to the end, you know we didn’t get through all the material, so I wanted to provide you with links to download what was there:

• Presentation (.PDF | Keynote | .PPT)
• Workshop Packet (Desert Group)
• Workshop Packet (Mountain Group)
• Workshop Packet (Rainforest Group)
• Workshop Packet (Island Group)

In particular, take a look at Epochs 5 and 6. At this point, the groups were going to begin trading with each other and dealing with linguistic borrowing. I found some good examples to illustrate different borrowing situations in natural languages in the presentation; I was really hoping to get to them! Live and learn.

Also, for Epoch 4, where I wrote “distinctions based on chance”, I was going to have each group pull a random feature from a hat. The features were as follows:

• Tense/Aspect: past/present/future; perfective/imperfective; present/past perfective/past imperfective; past/non-past
• Person Encoding: no verbal agreement; agree with subject in some person/number combinations, not all; agree with subject in all person/number combinations; agree with subject and object in some person/number combinations.
• Exponence: exclusively affixing; mix of affixation and particles; separate words; some affixation and some stem change.
• Wild Card: mark evidentiality on the verb; mark at least three moods on the verb; mark at least two voices or valency-changing operations on the verb; mark intentionality on the verb.

Again, thanks a lot for attending! If things work out, I hope to run this again at future WorldCons.