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

Good lord! I must have been sleeping in nomail (which sounds like an absence of
armor). When did you post that, Steg? <G> It's wonderfully funny! Teoh seems to
be involved in it. As you KNOW, I did reference Teoh in my essay I presented at
Berkeley. The walk from Berkeley back to Rochester is indeed long, and I came
home dejected--from splendid childhood memories, from lush graduate school
days, from a state full of flowers in March, and mountains and vertical cities
and oceans, from a campus that is like a city and a park with hills and hollows
and rushing streams and hidden forests--to a bleak ice storm in Rochester. Yes,
the commute is long. How premonitory of you!

Wedge-shaped diacritical marks? Heh heh... I've been toying with alternative writing
systems for Teonaht. One of them is stave-writ: some Teonim write their poetry
on musical staves, indicating an aberrant emphasis by a dip down to a lower
"key." I've got a poor sample of it at:
    
    http://www.frontiernet.net/~awen/stavewrit.html


Hey!  David!  Answer my post! :)
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: Steg Belsky 
  To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU 
  Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2003 3:16 AM
  Subject: 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