Re: The fruits of the first Bay Area conlangcon
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <grandsir@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, August 25, 1999, 6:51 |
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Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
>
> For those who are not yet aware, fate has fortuitously chosen to throw two
> members of the conlang list into the freshman class of UC Berkeley this
> year. The two (namely Adam Parrish and Josh Brandt-Young)decided to
> rendezvous last Thursday in the first (to our knowledge) Bay Area
> Conlangcon.
>
How lucky you are! I sure would be happy to have another conlanger in
my school.
> After walking in (oblivious) circles through the undergrowth of the campus
> for a time, they ended up at the library and went exploring.
>
> As they perused the books on various Southeast-Asian languages of which they
> had never before heard, they chatted merrily of Doraya morphology, Mark
> Line's beard, and the annoying fact that good references on interesting
> languages are extraordinarily hard to come by.
>
Of course, that's why those languages are so interesting :) .
> They soon noticed, though, that something seemed amiss: the library was
> unusually cold. Walking around the perimeter, they eventually found the
> cause. On the back wall, behind an immense series of shelves housing
> Vietnamese novels, there seemed to be large hole in the wall, beyond which
> lay...something difficult to make out.
>
> To make a long story short, they elected to step through; and found
> themselves, to their immense surprise, to be on a heretofore undiscovered
> Arctic island full of hunter-gatherer-looking people speaking a very
> odd-sounding language indeed.
>
> So, eager linguists-to-be that they were, they set about doing field
> research; this was made slightly difficult by the fact that the natives were
> entirely unintelligible, but they eventually pulled through and compiled a
> very tentative reference grammar which can be found on the web at
>
>
http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6073/Ephthdhkhqha.html
>
> Alas, they were unable to divine the tribe's name for itself; this is
> something they are planning to undertake in their next expedition. In the
> mean time, they would greatly appreciate your opinions on this most
> interesting language they've discovered.
>