angriguru

I was skimming the wikipedia page for Wari' this morning! Had no idea you had worked on the documentation of that language too.

Hey David! I'm a big fan, and I hope this doesn't get lost in the pleasant pile of comments.

I love Conlanging, I've been doing it since I was very young, yet only in the past few years have I realized there was such a vibrant community around it. My question is, how do you get dedicated to your project? I have so many different conlang sketches, where I have the phonology and grammar, which are often in decent depth, however, I only make enough words for examples of the different features of the language. I would love to have enough words to translate works into my conlangs (or make religious/cultural texts for my concultures) because its difficult to say you make fictional languages: then have a someone else say to give an example or to show it off, and then to respond with, "Well, I really just make grammar", and then get that confused look. Even beyond that, I have hundreds of unfinished phonologies that I've never done anything with. So if you have any advice, let me know.

1. Pirahã is quite well known for its small amount of phonemes, 6-7 consonants, 3 vowels, and 3 tones. It is often compared with !Xóõ having over 80 clicks and over 50 non-click consonants if I remember correctly. Do you think there is a potential lower/upper limit to phonemes in Human language?

2. I watched your Harvard lecture about language in Homo-Erectus. The phoneme is a very cognitive concept, in that it is generative, in a way. All words are constructed out of phonemes, and only in languages with an absurd amount phonemes are there phonemes that only occur in a single word. Is it possible to have a language without the concept of phonemes, where there are simply "words" without morphology? Do you think Homo-Erectus would have had the same idea of a phoneme?

They are hunter-gatherers, they don't grow their, food, and they never have to plan for harvests.