conlang names and Mensa

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shaul Vardi" <vardi@...>


> You guys should consider yourselves lucky - you're naming your Conlangs
> now as [presumably] sane adults.  I named my Conlang when I was 14,
> building my language during dull moments in math classes...  The result
> is (pretty embarrasingly) that my Conlang has ever since born the name
> Tesk.  Why?  (*Blush*) Because I saw the Conlang as a manifestation of
> my intelligence [bear in mind that I thought I was the only person in
> the world doing this]; intelligence led me to the organization Mensa
> [NOT a road I'd go down today]; mensa = table; and table in my Conlang
> is tesk.
>
> Happy naming!
This is really very funny, Shaul! :)  It's enlightening to understand the
processes of association we go through.  "Tesk," too, reminds me of "desk."
I don't know if you were thinking in terms of English then (I assume you are
multilingual), but I wonder if sitting at your desk in math class you chose
a name for table that subliminally reminded you of "desk" in English.
Teonaht comes from my need to find a name that reminded me of the orient, of
"Siam," which is what we called Thailand back in the fifties (or at least I
thought so; I was very influenced by the movie "The King and I").  Siam was
so lovely, so exotic, but I couldn't just copy it.  So I thought up Teon,
with the emphasis on the |o|.  It should really be spelled Teoon in Teonaht,
but that was before I had devised the double letter signal for emphasis.
Then it became "Teonean," as in Roumanian, Baviarian, etc., variously
spelled Teonyan, Taonean, etc.  When I hit on the -ath adjectival ending,
then it became Teonath.  When I decided to reverse the letters in the Roman
version of Teonaht writing, it became the word it is today.

Back to "mensa."  Mensa can also mean "meal," and as a deponent (mensa est)
"measured," "distributed," "estimated," and "traversed"  (metior, metiri,
mensus sum).  The organization Mensa may take its name from "table," as in
"round table," but it also has the coy suggestion in it of mens,
"mentality."  It was never an organization I was interested in joining,
since at the time I had (and still do) a high contempt for IQ tests and what
they "measure," which I think is pretty limited, and doesn't guarantee you
success or happiness.  And so did my mother, who felt that assigning a
number to someone's intelligence could either hamper their productivity
and/or make them so insufferable and cocky no one could live with them.  :)

I had a much better sense of the range of my mental abilities from an
aptitude testing agency called "The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation:
Human Engineering Laboratory."  I don't know if it still exists.  I don't
see any websites on it, and when I google it, I get the Berkeley Robots
Laboratory!

I take that back.  Here it is, and it's still going strong:
http://www.jocrf.org/Bulletin161.pdf

 It was a not-for-profit organization.  It was fabulous.  It tested a
wide-range of human abilities: inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning,
analytical reasoning, tonal memory, pitch discrimination, foresight,
creative association, breadth of vocabulary (this is one of the biggest
elements in "intelligence"--how much you read, how well you understand
ideas, how well you express yourself), memory for language (foreign language
ability), structural visualization, and personality type--a test that was
subtler than the Meyers-Briggs test.  It was meant to be an aid for
understanding your talents, your personality, and a guideline for choosing a
profession.  Unlike the IQ test, which just assigns you a numeric
designation and an attitude, it was aimed at providing for some degree of
success and happiness in your life.  The test was to be taken twice, since
aptitudes develop: once in your early teens and once at college level.  Some
of the tests seemed strange, but the organization had started it in 1922 by
testing individuals who were wildly successful in the careers they had
chosen: musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, teachers, writers, CEOs,
engineers, mathematicians, technicians, linguists, carpenters, doctors,
photographers, social workers, and so forth and so on.

Best of all, it wasn't a test that you could "fail," or that gave you a
NUMBER which determined your viability as a thinking and performing human
being.  And wisdom and experience will always trump high IQ.

Sally

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