Re: David Peterson, CSANA, and Made to Order Conlangs

Talking about meeting people (specifically you, Sally) ;-) ...
I'm pretty sure you were nomail when i originally sent this message to
the list:

~~~~~~~~~~
So i had a very weird dream last night.
For some reason, i was taking a class at the local community college (a
few of my friends who go to the same university as me do that because
certain classes are easier or have better teachers there).  It was an
English class, and the professor was Sally Caves!  She wrote stuff on the
blackboard and gave some kind of introduction to the class (it was the
first day), and wrote out our homework assignment on the blackboard.  It
seemed to involve reading mostly essays, but one of them was by her and
she said specifically to pay attention to the "Teoh" references.  And i
have no idea why my dream was calling Teonaht "Teoh", but i could tell
which of the words on the blackboard were Teonaht because they were
surrounded by decorative wedge-shaped diacritics.  So of course i started
planning how i would go up to her after class and introduce myself, but
then the dream's scene shifted and i was somewhere walking along the
southern bank of the Susquehanna river, westwards, and i was thinking
"this makes no sense... i can't walk to Rochester!" and then i
'remembered' that the class was given at some kind of extension of the
community college campus (which is actually in a different direction),
near me, and not all the way in Rochester, and then i thought "wow, how
does Sally do such a long commute?"  so then i kept walking towards where
the class is, but then the dream ended.
~~~~~~~~~~


-Stephen (Steg)
 "sleep is one-sixtieth of death."
     ~ the talmud

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 16:47:53 -0400 Sally Caves <scaves@...>
writes:

BTW, I went around looking for you after the conference.  My sister had
come up from Santa Cruz to listen to it;  we hadn't seen each other in a
year, and I needed to spend some time with her before she had to go back
(for some reason, she had to be back by 3:00--something to do with the
children).  So we were in the lounge area conferring.  I had so hoped you
would come up and talked to me, but it was so crazy.

Good to match name and face, David.  Too bad we didn't get a chance to
talk.  What is your work at CAL, and whom are you working with?

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

----- Original Message -----
From: David J. Peterson
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2003 3:16 PM
Subject: Re:       Re: Real Conlangs Here, Made-to-Order!

Hi Sally!  I liked your talk at the Celitc Conference in Berkeley (I was
the one with the click language who posed the idea that sound symbolism
appears in other places).
You wrote:
<<You've got the conlang, 30,000 words in two minutes.   Now you have to
learn it, like any natural language.  Sort of defeats the  purpose,
doesn't it? :)>>
My point with that message, of course, was sarcasm.  As yet, I still
haven't used the word generator to actually create words.  What I've been
doing is putting in phonemes and historical changes just to see what kind
of words I can get and how they look.  It's pretty neat.  But I still,
just as always, create words the same old way: (1) Decide the word to
create; (2) decide if it should be monomorphemic or not; (3) if so,
create a form that seems to fit; (4) if not, find a nonmonomorphemic way
to represent the idea.  It's still the only satisfying way.
-David

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