Re: a 12th century conlang

Okay Edward, to get back to conlanging and not flaming, let me address
some of these issues you raise.  You got into some trouble here, hon, in
your choice of adjectives.  I *love* to talk about the spiritual side of
conlanging, the inventive side of it, actually the *theory* of it.  But
getting all "googly about clever and abstruse bits of phonology and
grammar" is EXACTLY where it's at in the serious art of making up
a language.  That's the hands on part of it.  It's easy to wax romantic
about why we do this.  It's harder to do it, and the people who put
tremendous amounts of time into the invention of phonologies and
systems of grammar are doing so not dryly, but passionately.  If you
think that Teonaht is not without long LONG discussions I've participated
in on this list about the ergative vs the nominative, topic and focus, the
structure of an active language, the various ways to express a passive,
the use of aspect in any verbal system... then you haven't really taken
a look at my grammar.  My paper is not just about the googly aspects
of how fun it is to invent a language and how spiritually uplifting it is.
It cites and criticizes prior critical responses to language invention, and
it cites examples from a selection of conlangs that have developed on
this list.  It is woefully short (twenty minutes to express a twenty hour
concept), and I hope to lengthen it and include more examples than
I could for the Florida talk.  But really.  We need to avoid using the
kind of language that will get you slapped into Tuesday.  Both impulses
are operant in inventing language:  the passion for it and the mechanics
of it.

To continue...

Edward Heil wrote:

> Thanks, Sally.  I needed to hear this.
>
> It's too easy to get caught up in the theory of it all, and get all
> googly about clever and abstruse bits of phonology and grammar.
>
> I remember reading an essay by Ursula LeGuin, who was critiquing an
> essay by Poul Anderson.  Anderson had suggested figuring out the entire
> physics of your new solar system, bit by bit, with all these clever
> equations, and gradually figuring out what the world must be like.
>
> LeGuin simply said she didn't do it that way.  She dreamed the world,
> and wrote about it.  She discovered it, she didn't construct it with
> equations.
Neither did she really ever construct a language the way we do.  I readin an
article that she "faked it."  In "Walking Away From Omelas," she
came up with the name of her invented world by spelling "Salem O!"
backwards.  When asked if she did what Tolkien did, she said no.
I already described my encounter with novelist Brenda Clough
who expressed a similar distaste for this kind of passion.  She didn't
think it was practical.  But I don't share her distaste, and I said so.
If you don't care for the intense technical discussion of this group,
which lights the fires of most of us (along with the romance of doing
it and all that...), then perhaps you should frequent another list such
as ConCulture.  You'll find much more of what you're looking for
over there than here... but it's a little bit like coming into an
engineering
class and waxing sentimental about the beauty of the bridges and the
aquaducts, and losing patience over the measurements and equations
that construct them.  Do you see?

Cordially, Sally Caves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoteach.html    "easy Teonaht."(I think
Hildegard was probably a romantic conlanger... she had all the
beautiful words and used them in her hymns... but I can't see her
grappling with declensions, somehow.  But we'll never know.