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

On Sun, 4 Oct 1998 20:42:04 -0400, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
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?
>Sally
I had two years each of French and Spanish in high school, two years of
German and Russian in college, and one term of Chinese. I don't remember
enough to speak any of these languages, but I still recognize many of the
words. I've gone through the first 7 chapters of many of the "Teach
Yourself" books. Recently I've been trying to learn Japanese, but I've =
been
too busy at work lately to spend much time with languages, and I'm =
starting
to forget words already.

I started learning languages because I was interested in Spanish from
hearing it on Sesame Street. But when I was in high school I started
reading about other languages (such as Russian, Japanese, Esperanto) and
borrowing features that I liked to use in my own languages. (Olaetyan,
which was started in 1978, shows signs of having borrowed ideas from =
French
and Spanish.)