Re: SURVEY : YOUR FIRST CONWORK

Forgive me; I can't find Matthias' first post with this query, but it
poses an invaluable question!  Were my first conlanging efforts derived
from an obsession with naming or an obsession with grammar?  Well,
I started very young, nine years old (the semester I was introduced
to Spanish in fourth grade... I can still see the room and the playground,
the San Gabriel Mountains to the north).  The concept of a foreign
language was completely fascinating to me.  I might even have been
younger, but my first forays into language invention were renaming
familiar things.  I was in my backyard, lolling with Nancy DeKramer in one
or our lemon trees, and I said: "yes is tay, and no is vie.  When I say
tay, I mean yes, okay?  and when I say vie, I mean no."  We did this so
that we could fool Debbie and Dawn down the block.  Then: "cat is
shah-TAY, and dog is KOH-shuh."  Nancy and I wrote all these down and
started a special alphabet to record them.  I had no concept of grammar
whatsoever.  Whatever was a homonym in English was a homonyn as well in
Heaven Cat Language.  When I started Spanish in fourth grade, well this
just fueled the HCL.  I was so impressed that in Spanish you put the "not"
in front of the verb instead of after it, that it had no "didn't"
construction, and that it used reversal of verb and subject to express the
interrogative.  "Went your mother to the hairdresser?"  I'd write in
HCL, thinking I was being SOOOO exotic.  Where we couldn't immediately
think of a new word for something so unexciting as "hairdresser," we'd
just right the word with an "a" after it.  My sister, to this day, finds
this hysterical... calls Teonaht my "boxa" language.  "He put the boxa in
the cara."

It was exposure to various languages over the course of my teen years that
really made me dig in and make Teonaht complicated.  I've been very dogged
about pursuing one language, and see now that so many of you are
fascinated with the invention of new linguistic structures, such that you
pick up and discard your invented languages like clothes.  I couldn't do
that to Teonaht.  It has become an obsession of completeness for me, and
I'll have to admit that it really is the words rather than the exotic
grammar that keeps me at it.  I want a world of private words to wander
in, and I've put my efforts into giving Teonaht vocabulary character and
dimension and reality (for me).  Of course, I want it also to seem like a
real foreign language, with all the linguistic earthquakes and idioms that
a real language has.  Gone are the days of "Went she to the hairdresser";
Teonaht has to have its own logic and its own idiosyncracies.  But its the
words that count.  If only I could have all the words and memorized...
then I could learn it the way I've never really been able to do.  For me
to know a language I have to converse with someone, and this is exactly
what I can't do in Teonaht.  Hence all those questions in the second part
of my survey.

Sally


On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, Pablo Flores wrote:

> Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
>
> >I read last Matt Pearson's post replying to Pablo's post 'Another >Survey'
> (which by the way I misread and to which I replied beside the >point.) I
> find his few lines of first conlanging memories very >interesting. Forgive
> me my indiscretion, but I would really like to >know whether the young
> conlangers you all were were more absorbed in >naming than in making
> sentences. I would also like to know whether >the meaning or the images
> that were prompted to you by the words you >made up influenced the
> syntactic use of these words. To make it >clearer : I remember that for the
> many first months I had no concern >about conlang syntax because sentences
> would just come up to my mind >without having designed their structure
> first.
> [snip]
>
> When a was a child I began reading SF, lots of it, and then I began to
> write some too. Sometimes I needed to name a country, or an important
> character, or a new species of bird or tree, and it seemed natural
> for me to invent some names. I had no idea there was such thing as
> conlanging.
>
> Most times the names were just a lot of letters combined in strange
> ways in order to form alien-like words. I never translated sentences
> at this stage, but I did name a lot of places and people -- and some
> names were good ones.
>
> Then I wrote a short fantasy humorous story about an island, Panta,
> and I wanted to add some character to it so I translated a couple of
> verses of songs. I think that's when my conlanger vein surfaced. Soon
> I thought I needed a grammar for that. Then I needed more words. Then
> I needed a fixed phonology and a standard spelling to make things
> "serious". I finally wrote three stories, and the titles for them
> were in Pantato (the name of the language itself was meant to be humorous
> too).
>
> Pantato is now in a limbo, but I want to take it back and probably
> I will... if time permits.
>
>
> A sample of this and you'll tell me if it's not adorable :)
>
> Telre gebaru / gebaru Telre  "Telre the queen, queen Telre"
> Neshino / Neshino            "Majesty, Majesty"
> Aytsakempa^ / Chimahimpa^    "The awaited, the feared"
> Tupu re / saliu re           "like the thunder, like the rain"
> Telre Gepo Slebe Shoto       "Telre, First to Carry that Name"
>
>
> --Pablo Flores
>
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> end
>
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html

                        Mr. Book: "Shut it down!"
                        _Dark City_

                         Christof: "Cue the sun!"
                        _The Truman Show_

Tehwo tsema brondi laz obil hea nomai pendo
"Summer like a white sword hangs over the land."
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