Sally et al Surveys

Gotta love the subject header!

On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Carlos Thompson wrote:

> A question.  Is there any objection for using the information, or even part
> of the texts you have submit as answers to the surveys of Sally, Pablo,
> David Bush and others (mine, of course) and the Myers-Briggs descriptions in
> that site of mine?
>
Hi Carlos!  Mine aren't just curious questions, but ones I want to develop
for an extended article that I want to publish eventually.  I see it as a
rebuttal of Marina Yaguello's _Lunatic Lovers of Language_ in which I
counter her remark about the "pathology" of private language making with
the evidence I've gathered from you: that an electronic listserv has in
some ways given legitimation to and provided a venue for a new artform.
I'm very interested in the motivations you give me for your language
invention, how you regard it, why it is or is not private, why we relax
that secrecy on line, how the internet can provide us with physical space
for DISPLAYING our languages even more conveniently than passing around
paper copies; how this has become a valid artform in computer space.  I'd
like credit for thinking up the survey in the first place, and I wouldn't
want total replication of my survey questions; but I don't mind that you
use anything anyone has said here to comment more completely, on your
page, about our languages, our personalities, our motives, our
professions.  No, that would be great.  I'm an English professor, I'm
eNFj, as a child I learned of Tolkien after I had already started an
invented language, and Conlang has given me considerable incentive in my
adult life to tone Teonaht.  I learned HTML because of it, and that's a
feat!

I write both fiction and non-fiction, and this is a splendid topic for me,
one that may even allow me to dignify what it is so many of us have kept
secret from our professional colleagues.  May even allow me to "come out"
as a conlanger.  I "came out" as a television and sf writer and still
survived.  But were I to answer my own survey, which I haven't yet, I
would say that there is a strong reaction in the academic world against
getting involved in an enthusiasm like this.  One can study it, but it is
bad form to be a participant.  You can see the bind I'm in.  Especially as
a language scholar, where my studied languages should be my focus in the
minds of the Academy. Not a language I've made up.  How to show the
connection, now there's the challenge.  Because obviously there is one.

Sally
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html

Rin euab ouarjo vopy vytssema tohda uo zef:
ar al aippara brottwav; ad kemban aril yllefo
brotwav fenom; vybbrysan brotwav an; he ad
edirmerem brotwav kronom.

"A cat and a man are not all that different.
Both are on my bed; both lay their head on their
arm; both have mustaches; both purr when they
sleep."
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