Re: FINAL QUESTION: your natlangs. Sorry this is the last of the survey...

Sally Caves wrote:
>
> This should have been on the survey as well.  Mea maxima culpa... I don't
> mean to tax your patience.  But an obvious question to ask is whether
> your interest in inventing languages has some congruence with your
> learning or having learned another natural language.  As for me, I went
> into languages because of a secret need to fuel the invention engine for
> Teonaht.  Other people may have gone into conlanging because they are
> bilingual.  Mia's remark stirred my curiosity as well.  How many of you
> conlangers know other languages, and what is the extent of that knowledge?
>
Final question, Sally? Promise? Just kidding. I've been finding all the
replies interesting too.

My conlanging didn't coincide with studying natlangs, but when I was
introduced to linguistics in graduate school. My native tongue is
American English. I studied German through junior high and high school,
but it was just another academic subject which I could get A's in.
Didn't mean that I developed any real connection with it at the time, or
with languages in general, or certainly any fluency. Twenty years later,
I recall a smattering only.

In graduate school, I began taking linguistics classes due to my main
course of study at the time - Artificial Intelligence, which included
natural language processing, which connected with natural linguistics. I
was hooked. Around that same time, I was refereeing a fantasy
role-playing game and the world-building I needed to do for that gave me
the impetus to try using my new-found linguistic knowledge to shape a
constructed language.

The only other natural language I have any knowledge of is Japanese,
which I am currently studying. Definitely still a beginner. I'm studying
that for both family reasons (a number of my in-laws speak Japanese
fluently. Brownie points!), and entertainment reasons (we've both become
absolutely hooked on Japanese animation and comic books, and acquire the
original, untranslated versions whenever we can).

I'd love to go back and recover my German. There are many other
languages which I would also love to study: Norwegian, Irish Gaelic,
Czech. Time is the limiting factor.

Laurie
milo@winternet.com