Re: Greetings

En réponse à Sam Drost <sdrost@...>:

> Hello,
>      I'd like to introduce myself.
>
>      My name is Sam Drost.  I live in Glenpool, OK, USA.  I've been
> lurking
> around here for about two weeks now to see if the discussions on this
> list
> fit my curiosity, I'm happy to say that they do.
Welcome to the list then! Happy that we fit in your expectations ;)))) .

  However, I've had
> hardly
> any experience with any language besides English.
That's not per se reprehensible :)) . You're not the only one on the list.
You'll find that the international community which is this list will help you a
lot about that :) .

  I had two years of
> Spanish in high school but it's been almost 5 (god, has it been that
> long?)
> years since then.  I also have an interest in singing opera (I've
> started
> back at school and hope to do that as a career) and have sung many songs
> in
> Italian and could probably pronounce a lot of it correctly (or at least
> how
> my vocal coach pronounces it ;) but have little idea what it means.
>
That's something I've always been interested in: how do opera singer learn to
sing in languages they don't know. How did you learn to pronounce correctly the
trilled r of Italian for instance? I've always been impressed that singers,
when learning to sing a song phonetically, were often very good, even with
sounds that don't exist in their native tongue.

>      I became interested in conlanging when I came across Langmaker.com
> in
> my web browsings.  However my biggest problem seems to be coming up with
> a
> nice vocabulary that is different enough from English to be considered
> more
> than just a cipher of English.
>
Well, what makes a language a cypher of English is not really the vocabulary
but rather the grammar. When your grammar is different enough from English,
your vocabulary will naturally step aside from English (for instance, if in
your language all adjectives are verbs, they may have identical definitions as
corresponding English adjectives, they will be different enough to force
themselves out of this mould). So if I were you I'd worry more about your
grammar than about the vocabulary itself. After all, if you really want an
original vocabulary, you'll find out soon enough that you have to think about
who actually speaks the language, and will end up having to create a whole
conculture ;)))) .

>      Anyway, that's about all I can think to write right now so I
> guess
> I'll shut up now.
>
Please don't! If you have any questions, please ask them, we're here for that!

Welcome again!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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