CHAT: Using cats for practice

H=EFlad,

I am coming to the opinion that a good way to practise speaking one's
conlang is to use it when talking to the cat. Such conversations have a
number of benefits:

* It is essentially one-sided, so there is no need to spend time trying
  to work out what the other person is saying; this gives more time to
  concentrate on getting the right case, word order, etc for one's own
  next sentence. Cat speech, while somewhat ambiguous (see Conlang
  passim) is easy to parse.

* The cat doesn't mind how long it takes to formulate each sentence.

* Nor does it care what language you speak in (unlike humans, who are
  wont to react unreliably in response to anything 'foreign').

* One finds the flaws in a language when speaking it - what bits are
  nigh-on impossible to work out on the fly, what sound combinations are
  just too difficult, where elision would naturally occur - and such
  experimentation is of no consequence to a cat, who won't be keeping
  track of changes.

I wonder whether any other listmembers do something similar...

James/=C4lvard

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+ James Campbell            + Zeugma: http://www.zeugma.force9.co.uk    +
+ james@zeugma.force9.co.uk + Jameld: http://www.zeugma.force9.co.uk/zm +
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