Reddit reviews Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists

Building off of what others have said— it helps to look at bilingual dictionaries and see the varied ways terms translate. As an example, see the English Wiktionary entry for French gentil. This word is what English borrowed 'gentle' from, but there are still senses and differences from what you get with the related English word. Ideally, just about every word will have at least a bit of complexity- even words that translate to very concrete concepts like 'tree' or 'rock' may have metaphorical extensions, idiomatic uses, etc.


For more 'grammatical' parts of the language, it's good to remember that labels like 'accusative' or 'passive' only refer to one aspect of a construction's use. In Latin, the accusative and ablative both appeared with prepositions, and which case was used determined whether the sense was location or movement, like 'in' vs 'into' (sorry, I don't remember which case is which). You'd never get that just by reading the definition of an accusative case though.

In English, there are two main possessive constructions: X's Y and Y of X. However the usage of each is somewhat different, and both include usages that wouldn't be considered ownership. Your language should have some way of expressing all of the senses these English constructions do, but they should have different distributions and range of semantics.

Wikipedia can be a good resource for learning about some of the possibilities of various grammatical categories. If you can, I'd recommend grabbing a copy of Describing Morphosyntax - it goes through many possibilities for different constructions and gives plenty of examples.

You might get some benefit from Payne 1997's Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists, which goes over methods, gives examples of common problems, and gives potential solutions to problems incurred with such a project. However, it focuses on reference grammar writing over historical linguistics.

I learned from the crosspost that you do not want to reveal the language because of privacy issues. Please reconsider as it would be much easier for the community to help. Giving at least the language family would help.

At this point, it seems that if you're serious about this language you have to do linguistics one way or another. Even if you do not plan to read a paper on the language, you would still have to learn at least some linguistics in order to figure out how the language works from speakers (i.e. doing fieldwork)--basically knowing what to do or ask, which is your question. But if you did know linguistics, perhaps it would be easier to access the existing linguistic resources. Fieldwork is a difficult and painstaking process and it takes even professional field linguists many years literally living with the native speakers to really understand the workings of a language.

If you do decide to start learning linguistics for this situation, try a typologically oriented introduction to linguistics, like Payne's Describing Morphosyntax and Exploring Language Structure.

Start with Wikipedia. For linguistics is pretty good and some of my professors have suggested I used to get familiar with topics before I research them a bit a more. The nice thing about wikipedia articles is if you are interested in reading more you can just go to the articles and books they cite at the bottom. I would also suggest you check out Describing Morphosyntax. It gives a really good introduction to various topics and just all around interesting.

Someone on here suggested the Language Construction Kit and I would also suggest that because even though it might now be the best introduction out there it will introduce you to the magical world of conlanging. For me if it wasn't for conlanging I probably wouldn't have been as motivated to learn linguistic topics and to get familiar with a wide range of languages.

Depends on what parts of linguistics you're most interested in. I like morphology, so I'd recommend this.

I'd highly recommend The Structure of Language. It's not actually published yet, but we used a sort of preview version for my Syntax & Semantics course and I liked it. Also I know lots of people who like Describing Morphosyntax. I didn't like it a lot (probably because I didn't spend enough time reading it as I should have). It's quite thorough.

Edit: I just looked through Simpler Syntax on google books. It seems interesting, but I don't know if it would make a very good educational book. It's really more of a description of an individual syntactic theory.

A few years ago, I made a language for an independent study at my university. It mostly consisted of translating the Tower of Babel into the language. It was something that showed my language had at least limited use.

I've tried twice since then to create another language, somewhat based off my previous work- but mostly trying out new things, doing more research than before, etc. It hasn't been successful. I keep getting indecisive about things.

I've been using The Language Construction Kit as a reference - especially the book version. It's a pretty decent book that does cover things more in detail than the site (plus, very handy to carry around). How to Create a Language is another useful site. These are great sources for going through the process of making a language (in the book, the author includes part of a grammar on one of his languages, and includes commentary on the decisions and mistakes he made).

I also really love Describing Morphosyntax. It's much more detailed than any of the above- as it's more aimed for linguists. It goes through the process of things to look for in a language when documenting it. It explains variation of the different aspects of grammar, which I've found very helpful to determine ideas to incorporate for my language.

Livejournal's Conlangs community is another good resource.

Edit (#4?) I just found the Conlangs Wikia (check out the conlangs category or list of conlangs to see example languages)

Reading Describing Morphosyntax may result in something a bit more complicated than what you're looking for, but the end product will be awesome, and you'll probably learn a ton along the way. I certainly have been.

EDIT: Also, the final section of the Language Construction Kit offers some advice and a possible outline.

If you mean get into, as in you want to be interested but just can't find the motivation, what got me interested was reading about it. Learn from the best. Here are some good ones on documentation itself (I guess more on the eminence of languages dying and the need for documentation):

• Linguistic Fieldwork—Claire Bowern
  
  
• When Languages Die—David Harrison
  
  
• Vanishing Voices—Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine
  
  
• Endangered Languages—Sarah G. Thomason
  
  Fieldwork is often closely associated with typology, so here are some books that explain some of what's possible in the world's languages:
  
  
• Describing Morphosyntax—Thomas Payne
  
  
• Ergativity—R.M.W. Dixon
  
  
• Changing Valency—R.M.W. Dixon & Alexandra Aikhenvald
  
  And then there are reference grammars, often the fruits of fieldwork. Here are some good ones I've gone through:
  
  
• A Grammar of Tariana—Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
  
  
• A Grammar of Hup—Patience Epps
  
  
• Basically any other one in the Mouton Grammar Library, plus here are some free ones from Language Science Press.
  
  Then again, if you mean get into it meaning what language should you pick and what part of the world, that's a harder question to answer. I feel like languages just sort of happen to people: they know someone who happens to come from a community of minority language speakers, or they have a friend who says they ran into an understudied language while abroad, or you yourself happened to live in that part of the world for whatever reason. It's hard to go study a language out of the blue because you need an "in" somehow, which is hard to purposely get, I think.