Re: Conlanging as a personal thing

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 11:04:00PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mike Ellis" <nihilsum@...>
[snip]
> visceral.  For instance:  I can't remember a word I made up a week ago.  Yet
> I think, what is "call"?  I haven't thought of this word in years.  There it
> was, on the tip of my tongue.  Tava.   So some words are deep in the flesh,
> and others aren't.  Especially the newest constructions.  Weird, isn't it?
I read this paragraph several times, wondering why it stands out to me
so... and suddenly, I remembered that _Ta'va_ ["t_haBa] in Ebisedian is
the verb for "to eject", "to spew", or "to vomit". :-P

The verb for "call" is _ga'ma_ ["gama]. A cognate is the noun _g3mi'_
[g@\"mi], "name".  There's also _Ka'ma_ ["k_hama], "to scream", "to yell".

[snip]
> "adjectives" under "comparison."  There it was, written in I don't know how
> long ago.  Uor.  It comes from _ouar_, "other."  The language is beginning
> to speak for itself.
That happens to me a lot. Sometimes when I'm writing an Ebisedian text, I
have this gut feeling that there must've been a word for the concept I'm
trying to express, but I'm unsure so I make up a new word anyway. And then
when I search through the lexicon, I "discover" that a similar word (often
similar in sound to what I just made up) has already been entered.

> I think a good exercise for practiced fluency is to take sixty words out of
> your pocket that you know you know and spread them before you like cards on
> a table.  Make a poem out of them.  Let them take root as a poem where
> intelligible meaning is not so important as getting the patterns of speech
> down, the syntax, and mostly the words.
Back when the Ebisedian grammar was written in HTML, I forced myself to
write up large tables of different word forms by hand. Ebisedian nouns
have at least 15 different inflected forms (3 numbers * 5 cases), each
with their own vowel gradations. For poly-gendered nouns, there are up to
75 forms (15 * 5 genders, although not many nouns actually cover all 5
genders). Verbs have 9 basic forms, 27 if you throw in verb domain (but at
the time I haven't finalized the inflectional forms of the other two
domains yet). Writing up these long tables by hand helped me internalize
Ebisedian's vowel gradation patterns, and I certainly remember those
particular words very well. :-)

> Say anything you want within the confines of those chosen words.  Vary
> the sentence patterns.  Then, when you've remembered them and their
> constructions, take out another sixty, perhaps ones you don't know so
> well.  And another.  And another.  It may take months, years, but this
> might get them under the skin.
Good idea. For me, though, it's much more memorable if there was a story
associated with the word. Perhaps writing a children's story about
different parts of the body will help me memorize anatomical terms.

> I have a friend who does something like this in natural languages that
> he teaches to himself.  He writes phrases in Russian, Greek, Hebrew,
> Italian, French, over and over and over and over again in a journal.
> The writing helps the memorization.  I bought him a new journal for this
> express purpose.  But I like my card game better.
[snip]

Hmm. I suspect your friend's method would work better for me. I'm no good
at shuffling words around like in your card game; somehow it just confuses
me.


T

--
If you want to solve a problem, you need to address the root cause of the
problem, not just the symptoms. Otherwise it's like treating cancer with
Tylenol...