Re: Pablo is back, Job, Argentina, Relay, Lord of the Rings

Sally Caves <scaves@...> a écrit :

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
God knows, if I know anything about conlanging, and I've done it for thirty
years with an ever increasing sense of sophistication and wariness, one does
subconsciously borrow from other languages, thinking one has produced something
original.
To wit: my "belreg," which is the word for "combat," "battle," but which I now
realize I stole from Tolkien's "balrog" long years ago.  It only just occurred
to me,
now that I've seen the film and am reading the books all over again.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
i so witness too. when i was a kid i tried to avoid obvious loanwords in my
conlang but to no avail. funny how concepts "sound" something in your head and
mouth. when i made adzes with arrows, i would call them "Fek" because the
bilabial fricative made me think of the wind and "ek" told me "out/off" (i found
later that it was the greek for that too) and a stick was "p'ek" because of the
same harsh move to break, take or send something off with a knallendem p'. also
i was 9 and didn't have learned, heard or read any language with bilabial
fricative and plosive p' that french lacks entirely so i believe for sure that
conlanging children can use sounds they've never heard in their own natlang. my
first conlanging words were full of tk, kt, tS, tl, ty, ky, km, tm, etc. that
are not quite common in beauuuutiful french. and what's more, my conlang grammar
worked in a way absolutely alien to french in many respects so i also believe a
kid can make up a grammar of his own. for instance i would say:
ak tu = i eat
tu a nli = the animal eats
tu ak a nli = i eat the animal
tu nli = the animal is eaten
tu a nli a ak = i feed the animal
(i was on my grandpa's everraining farm half the year so i had a pretty redneck
conlang vocabulary). i didn't even know what the word "syntax" meant. i clearly
remember this word order came naturally to me and i was so angry because i
couldn't explain it to myself. i also remember the minute i realized i needed
something i later learned was a subclause. those were the days all of us
experienced, i guess...

oh, and here is a question i always wanted to ask but never did because it's so
cliché: did anyone make up a conlang word and realize it was the same in another
natlang s/he never heard of before? i remember stuff like "nepi" for baby and
the day after (really the day after and no later, i swear it) i had this class
where we read the homer greek nepios "young child". this cast some doubt in my
head about claimed "intercivilization" loanwords that were so fashionable then.
two years ago i made my conlang vocabulary with excel: i listed the 1400-or-so
root concepts i had painstakingly gathered through years on one column. then i
selected the 8 archconsonants and 5 vowels i had heard in most languages i knew
of and made 1400-or-so CVCV words out of them and listed them on another column.
then i shuffled the CVCV column with the "random" excel application and guess
what? i "discovered" plenty of "cognates" with natlangs! "tebe/tepe" came out as
mountain" (nahuatl "tepetl", turkish "tepi", english "top", etc.),  "minu" was
"eye" (japanese "me/miru/manako", "taka" was "man" (pascuan "tangata"), "bami"
was "brother", "bume/pume" was "smoke", "bimi" was "two", etc. since that day
i've read Meritt Ruhlen's book "The Origin of Language" with another pair of
eyes :-))))


Mathias
www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm

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