On Jan 19, 2008 10:39 AM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> == Part A: Personal and demographic data. ==
> 01. a. What is your name (or online handle)?
Sai Emrys
> b. May I quote you by name or handle in an article or talk about
> conlang fluency?
Yes
> 02. a. What is your preferred email address (if not the address you
> are sending the survey response from)?
conlangs@saizai.com
> b. May I contact you with follow-up questions?
Yes
> 03. Do you have a website relating to your constructed language(s)?
> If so, what is its URL?
My blog - http://saizai.livejournal.com - has links to posts I've made
about conlangs on the left.
> 04. a. How old are you?
26
> b. How old were you when you first started creating languages?
15?
> c. How old were you when you first attained significant fluency
> in (one of) your constructed language(s)?
n/a
> 05. Are you male or female?
Male
> 06. a. What is your nationality?
> b. Where do you live now?
USA
> c. Where were your ancestors from?
Russia
> 07. What is/are your native language(s)?
English, Russian
> 08. What natural languages other than your native one(s) have you
> studied? What degree of fluency have you attained in them?
Spanish, French, ASL - enough for most non-technical conversations;
Japanese - low intermediate; Arabic, Mandarin - rusted to nigh
uselessness
> 09. What constructed languages created by other people have you
> studied? What degree of fluency have you attained in them?
Ithkuil, Toki Pona, Lojban, Laadan etc... but neither seeking nor
achieving fluency.
(I am almost exclusively a meta-engelanger at this point; I look at
other conlangs, in terms of personal interest, only to glean ways to
manipulate language.)
> 10. What is your level of education? What is/was/will be your major
> or specialization?
UC Berkeley B.A. Cognitive Science '05.
Intending to get PhD or MD/PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
> 11. What is (was/probably will be) your trade or profession?
Current: Consultancy (aka computer work) & tutoring
Future: Teaching & research, maybe? Though I've a number of other interests...
> 12. Do you work part time? full time? Are you a student or retired?
Part time. Ex-student.
> 13. a. What is your (approximate) income?
> b. What was your family's approximate income when you were a
> child?
No comment.
> 14. Are you single, married, divorced, widowed, remarried...?
I have two boyfriends. One's also a conlanger. Never been married,
don't expect to in the near future, but probably someday...
> 15. a. What is your religion, if any?
Emphatic weak agnosticism plus quasi idiosyncratic Buddhism plus Discordianism.
> b. What was your religious upbringing, if any?
None. Half the family is Jewish, half is undeterminable.
> 16. Are there other facts about yourself that you think might be
> relevant?
*shrug* (For scads of facts about myself, see the 'about me' post on
my blog. Not sure what's *relevant* though...)
> == Part B: The nature of your conlang. ==
> 17. What is the name of your primary conlang (the one you have
> invested the most effort in or are most fluent in)?
n/a or NLF2dWS
> 18. What are the basic purpose(s) and design goals of your conlang?
To create something new, whose design is better than that of existing options.
Given that the spoken-language market is glutted, and the signed one
is hard to enter, I've decided to concentrate on creating a
written(-only) language that is optimized for its medium.
> Is it associated with an imagined world or culture? If so, are the
> speakers human?
No. Yes.
(This should probably be a separate question.)
> 19. Is your conlang a priori (devised from scratch) or a posteriori
> (based on a specific natural language or language family), or a mix
> of a priori and a posteriori elements?
A priori, borrowing ideas from many nat/conlangs.
> 20. Describe the typology of your conlang - what is its primary word
> order (SVO, SOV, VSO...; pre- or postpositional; etc.)? Is it
> isolating, agglutinating, fusional, polysynthetic? Is its case or
> word order system primarily accusative, ergative, active,
> other...?
n/a
> 21. a. How extensive or complete do you consider your conlang to be (in
> grammar and vocabulary)?
Barely started
> b. If you are not yet fluent in it, do you consider the language
> complete enough for fluency to be attainable, or would it need
> considerably more development for that to be possible?
No, yes.
> 22. Does your conlang have features that might be expected to make it
> especially difficult for speakers of your native language?
No
> 23. Does your conlang have possibly unnatural features that might be
> expected to make fluency difficult or impossible for humans?
No
> == Part C: Fluency in your conlang. ==
> 24. a. Do you intend to become fluent in your conlang, or did you when
> you started creating it?
Yes
> b. If not, did you find yourself becoming fluent as an unexpected
> result of developing and using it?
n/a
> 25. If you intend to become fluent in your conlang, what are your
> goals or purposes for learning it?
See above.
> 26. What do you use (or intend to use) your conlang for?
[snip]
> 36. If you are fluent in your conlang only when speaking or writing
> about certain subjects, what are those subjects?
No or n/a
> 37. Have you found anyone willing to learn your conlang and speak it
> with you, or correspond with you in it? If so, please describe
> the experience.
Approx. My conlanging boyfriend has been happy to work with me on it,
and we exchange ideas semiregularly.
> 38. a. What methods have you used to study your conlang and improve your
> fluency in it?
> b. Which have you found most effective?
n/a
> 39. How do you do most of the primary work on your conlang? In your
> head, writing stuff down later if at all, or on paper with
> pencil/pen, or with a voice recording/playback system, or at a
> computer, or...?
Some pen/paper, some online essay-writing, mostly just in my head.
> 40. Have you made significant changes in your conlang due to your
> experience using it? In what way?
[snip]
> 44. Has your fluency in your conlang influenced the way you speak your
> native language, or other languages you are fluent in?
n/a
> 45. Is there anything else you would like to add?
I'm probably a rarity as a conlanger, in that I don't especially care
to create yet another language (though I suppose I could, and have
taught two classes on how to do so). My desire to make something *new
and better* has taken me to a bit of an extreme of top-down design, to
the point where I've been mired for years now on figuring out the top
levels and how they might actually work so as to fulfill all my
desiderata.
This doesn't bother me especially - I fully expect my projects to take
a couple decades - but it does mean that I haven't yet much to show
for it in the usual sense; no words, no samples, just some design
specs and a (slowly) increasingly coherent conception of what the damn
thing will look like, that's mostly in my head.
This is relatively normal for how I work though; I percolate for a
long time and then dump it to an externalization (essay, poem, design
spec, whatever) in one sitting.
- Sai