Re: My girlfriend is a conlanger!

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 11:52:04AM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
[snip]
> It's not surprising how the list gives one a reason to continue
> Conlanging.  I left Teonaht alone for years at a time (in Wales and
> Switzerland, I hadn't even brought my Teonaht notebooks).  I took it up
> again when I bought a house in Rochester.  But sometimes just working on
> it would make me sick to my stomach.  Where is this going? I thought.
> I'm crazy to work on something no one will ever see.  I have to write a
> novel, I thought.  (I've started one; am about a third of the way
> through it). Then I found CONLANG.  Here is where one finds an audience.
> So I wrote my article about Audience and Conlanging.
[snip]

Deja vu. Before I found CONLANG, in spite of the fact that I regularly
indulge in hobbies of little or no potential value[1], I still was
reluctant to do real development of Ebisedian (then unnamed). I thought,
well, I *could* just pretend that the Ebisedi (also then unnamed) spoke
their own language, we don't have to know what it is for the story to go
on.

(Of course, later I realized that to have any logical system of native
names, I'd *have* to invent at least a naming language. Initially I had
started by mangling English words beyond recognition and using those as my
place names. Some of these still remain today, such as the name
"Ferochromon", which is properly _K0rumoPe'rim_ [k_hAr`umo"p_h&r`im],
"colorful universe". The backwards correspondence is due to a word order
change from when I made the original names. The Ebisedian words were, of
course, designed after the fact to correspond with the original name---at
least in meaning, if not in order.)

--------
[1] Such as developing calculus theorems that are more or less useless,
writing orchestral music that I will probably never hear in my
lifetime[2], contemplating such useless questions as "what if the universe
didn't only have positive and negative charges, but had a third,
independent charge?"... or conworlding for that matter!

[2] Due to the fact that I didn't *know*[3] how to write orchestral music
to begin with!

[3] But now I've actually gotten off my lazy butt and bought some books on
orchestral writing, so I'm now more likely to write performable pieces.[4]
:-P

[4] Although that depends on one's perspective as to what is "performable"
... I mean, if I write something that only professionals have any hope of
performing, and I am an unknown with no recognized portfolio, then it's
all moot. But that symphony orchestra in my head just refuses[5] to stop
playing!

[5] Just as this obsession of mine this morning with recursive[5]
footnotes. OK, I'll stop now, I promise!!


T

--
Don't get stuck in a closet -- wear yourself out.

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