Re: Like Father, Like Son (or, Languages and Other Hobbies)

On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 14:52:49 +0200, Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
wrote:

>My father is obsessed with birds - he stuffs 'em (taxidermy style). He
>has collected over 8000 specimens of different birds from around the
>world. Occassionally, he works for the zoological museum doing some
>taxidermy work for them in return for access to the museum's vault of
>specimens. He just wants to see and identify all the birds of the world
>(dead or alive). On day, when he kicks the bucket, he wants me to donate
>his collection to the museum.
>
>Like conlanging, its an unusual hobby. Similarly, its not too well met
It certainly sounds unusual, but interesting. I just collect pictures and
sound recordings of birds, which is unusual enough in itself. I probably
have recordings of around 4,000 different species, and a similar number of
pictures in books (more if you count illustrations in field guides).

Lately I've also been collecting names of birds in various languages. I'm
trying to put them all together in a coherent list, but correlating the
different lists from numerous sources is a tricky and time-consuming task.
(Scientific names often change as species are combined or split in various
ways over time, and common names are even less reliable.)

I'd eventually like to be able to name all the bird and mammal species in
one of my languages, thus bringing two of my interests together in one big
project. I started on that with the Animal Names Project in Jarrda (on the
web at http://www.io.com/~hmiller/dict/anp.html), which had the more
limited goal of just creating enough vocabulary to be capable of expressing
the names of all bird and mammal species. Tirelat inherited the project,
but I've actually been thinking about setting Tirelat aside for a while and
trying to come up with something that approaches more closely my view of
what an "ideal language" would be like. (Tirelat is okay, but has a lot of
quirky features that are deliberately other than "ideal".)

--
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