Re: Conlanging as a personal thing

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Ellis" <nihilsum@...>


> Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>
> >> What would "full" communicability be?
> >
> >Simple: if you can have reasonably long conversation by e-mail (or
> telephone,
> >for that matter) without having to create new words. I'm mean, if you
want
> to
> >write: "I just received your letter and found it very interesting", and
> have to
> >create five new words for that, than a language is clearly not ready for
> >communication yet.
:)

I would think that "full" communicability would also require a respondent
who could also read said email.  If you take "full communicability" to mean
the other end of what is communicated, then very few conlangs can live up to
that except, perhaps for Kerno and Brithennig and Klingon.  The married
couple that John described in the "Introduction to Paul Burgess" thread are
a real find.  How lovely to be working on an invented language together, and
to get to speak to each other in it--at breakfast, in bed, on email... it's
like an intellectual form of "twin speech."  Vocabulary would grow by leaps
and bounds because you would have a partner to reinforce your mutual
inventions.  Sigh!

Fyl krespro uary mal bettai, send ain nicodel elry kare.
"Your letter have I now received, and meaningful did I think it."

First clause, easy-peasy.  Second clause: didn't have a word for
"interesting."  !!!!  Looked for it in my less than adequate on-line
lexicon.  So I had to substitute "meaningful."  Now this is a hedge;
Teonaht is definitely not ready for even "half" communicability (if you take
my new definition of communicability into consideration), in that what I
wanted to express in English I found inexpressible in Teonaht and had to go
around it.  But I think that an equivalent for "interest" in T. will have to
include the concept of "significance."  Something is interesting only
insofar as it is significant to you, right?

P.S.  Looked in my old weathered, penciled, thirty year old lexicon and
found etecebo for "interesting" (old, stupid present participle suffix).
But that's not where I looked first.  At one time, obviously, I made up a
word for this concept, and will have to reinstate it.  Fascination and
intrigue have to be something you can express in Teonaht.

> >But don't ask me how many words a language must have to be communicable
in
> this
> >way. Some will say 2 000, others will argue 5 000 or even 10 000.
Paul Burgess opined that he had about a thousand words in his vocabulary,
but I think it must be far more than that if he can talk so fluently about
television and web sites.  Yet he told me in a private mailing that while he
had a word for "kitchen," he didn't have a word for "sink."

> I would put it up at 10 000 or even higher. Rhean has over 2000 words but
I
> still don't think there's been a translation I've done for which I didn't
> have to make up a few more.
And remembering them all, of course.  T has a pretty good-sized lexicon for
an invented language, but they are not in circulation.  The only thing that
will make me remember all of them, and give me the communicability that I
want, is to write it, write it, and write it, the way Mao does.  And about
different things.  I can't think it, think it, think it, the way Paul does.
I'm still in the writing stage.

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."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoeng.html

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