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Re: My girlfriend is a conlanger!

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Friday, March 14, 2003, 17:51
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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Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>Composing (jara: My girlfriend is a conlanger!)