Re: CHAT: The love of inventing & conscripts (Was: Re: I'm new!)

On Sat, Oct 21, 2000 at 03:45:52PM -0700, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
[snip ...]
> result pronounceable.  In a bizzare conlanging accident, the result of one
> of these mutations was "ni" for "the."  I like the sound of it and put it
> into my conlang, where it survives to this day!  Thus, the Yivríndi owe
> their definite article to my earliest linguistic games.
Heh. I've this temptation to import glyphs from my last obfuscated English
conscript experiment into my conlang's script... In fact, I've already
imported a symbol for "l" and derived the glyph of "r" from it as well.

> I can see the warnings for concerned parents:  "If your
> child spends a lot of time playing with codes, talking in
> deliberate gibberish, or inventing made-up animals or cultures, he/she may
> be at risk for becoming a conlanger!  This strange, addictive disorder can
> cause those afflicted to stay up at night trying to develop better verb
> paradigms, to wrestle with the intricacies of the subjunctive marker, or
> to think they actually know what "ergativity" is.  Watch out for these
> warning signs!"
[snip]

LOL!! That sound like me, all right. :-) I remember my dad telling me to
"stop dramatizing", because I used to walk around openly making strange
gestures and weird sounds (ya know, when you are imagining a gigantic
explosion, you just *gotta* make that drawn-out explosive sound with your
vocal apparatus!) Of course, that made the other kids at school call me
weird or strange, but I was enough of a rebel at heart that I ignored
them. Peer pressure was something I rebelled against, during that time: I
had (and still have) this hatred of being a certain way just because
everyone else around me is that way.

At least my dad didn't stifle my creativity, though. He always encouraged
me to explore, discover, and invent things. I guess he just wanted, for my
sake, me not to be *too* strange. :-P


T