Re: CHAT: Myers-Briggs Types and stuff.

Some further thoughts on Conlanging and Personality Type

I mentioned recently that I was an ISTJ after a few others mentioned they
were INFPs. As someone else pointed out, the I seems self-evident.

However, all this really does need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
Even the Meyers-Briggs people say that any four letter type be expressed in
a wide variety of ways.

I would also like to point out that the other three letters are much more
nebulously defined and much easier to change. I think it was Jerome Kagan
who argued that the I vs. E part of the personality assessment was very
likely determined by one's genes. [Insert here all the caveats about how
genes don't actually code for these things directly and that environment of
one sort or another is involved as well.] It also seems to be the only part
of personality categorization that seems to be universal. Galen would have
recognized it. His Chinese counterpart likewise.

I suspect that one difference in conlanging which could correlate with
personality type is whether one is better at the vocabulary or at the
syntax. Me, I'm lousy at vocabulary. It's my biggest obstacle at learning a
natlang. But, give me some obscure grammatical construction and explain to
me how it works, and I'll remember it forever. [Well, that's a slight
exaggeration, but...]

Once, when I was a linguistics student, I tried to explain to another
student how Kelenj worked. I was showing him some syntactical construct [I
can't remember which exactly, and it probably doesn't exist in my language
anymore. I think kelenj was an ergative language with verbs in it back
then.] Anyway, I was writing this sentence on the blackboard and I couldn't
remember the kelenj word for "pretty" so I just wrote the Spanish word
"lindo" instead. It was close enough and Spanish phonology just doesn't
clash with kelenj phonology like English does. His reaction was to dismiss
my entire effort with "Oh, it's just like Spanish." to which I wish I had
replied, "No, you doofus. Stop looking at the arbitrary surface stuff and
look at the structure!" [Though, one could argue that every aspect of
conlanging is arbitrary.]

So, that's my take on things. I created Kelenj to play with syntax and the
vocabulary is secondary to me. Anything that fits phonologically is fine by
me.

Then again, someone else couls say, "Well, of course you prefer syntax to
vocabulary. You are an SJ after all."

BTW the Kelenj word for pretty as used to describe people is "sholja". 'j'
is a palatal glide. 'nj' is a palatal nasal. 'sh' is just like English
'sh'. The vowels are usually Latin vowels. Anything else is up to you.




Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sylvia1/