Re: a 12th century conlang

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.

One can draw a parallel to methods of conlanging -- starting with a
bunch of abstract decisions about what would be a clever and unusual bit
of phonetics, what would be an elegant and spiffy grammar...  Or else
diving in and making something which if perhaps less clever is from the
soul, and not just the brain.

Ed



>As far as I can tell, Hildegard used it more or less the way you andI
throw
>ourselves passionately into language invention.  This isn't
>"glossolalia," as some critics have tried to label it, but conlanging
>for personal aesthetic and spiritual reasons.  Hildegard's words
>crop up frequently in her poetry;  one of the reasons I asked on
>the Lunatic Survey about the sexiness, the sensuality, and the
>*spirituality* of inventing a language was because my Teonaht,
>back when I was a callow youth in my teens, was a language of
>prayer.  Therefore I can relate pretty personally to what I think
>Hildegard is doing.
>
>From Liturgical Song 67:
>
>        O *orzchis* Ecclesia,
>        armis divinis praecincta,
>        et hyazintho ornata,
>        tu es *caldemia*
>        stigmatum *loifolum*
>        et urbs scientiarum.
>        O, O, tu es etiam *crizanta*
>        in alto sono et es *chorzta* gemma.
>
>        Oh immense Ecclesia,
>        girded with divine arms,
>        and bedecked in hyacinth,
>        you are the fragrance
>        of the wounds of peoples
>        and the city of knowledge.
>        Oh, oh, you are truly anointed
>        amidst lofty sounds and are
>           a sparkling gem.
>
>                                    trans. J. Schnapp
>
>Hildegard spoke some kind of Germanic dialect as her
>first tongue... undoubtedly her exposure to Latin opened
>up for her a world of lexical wonders.  All of us on this
>list who were moved at an early age by a foreign language
>could probably relate to this magical contact with an
>"unknown" language inside of us.
>
>Sally
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