Re: Conlanging as a personal thing

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

Hi Mike... I think the difference between me and Paul is that he has
internalized his mna_Vanantha in ways that I never did Teonaht, because I
was so distracted by other pursuits--long years of ignoring it
altogether--whereas Paul "spoke" it to himself in his head since the age of
thirteen.  He doesn't have a written lexicon, as far as I can tell from my
communications with him, or at least an incomplete one.   I think Tolkien
may have been the same.  I read somewhere that he intended to write his
Silmarillion in Quenya and I, a mere graduate student in Teonaht back in the
late seventies, was stunned and amazed and jealous.  And yet in the Secret
Vice he admits to the limitations of an invented language like Quenya,
especially insofar as the vast vocabulary that is needed for it to express
all the mundane things of the world.  It hasn't had the proper circulation,
he says, for it to acquire the subtleties of a real language.  So... for
Tolkien, maybe, the events of the Silmarillion could be expressed in Quenya,
because there was no need to invent vocabulary for spark plug, or ear wax,
or television station.  Or "I would appreciate it if..."

I also think Paul is a creative genius who has a prodigious memory (God, if
I could have that memory what I could DO with Teonaht! or any language for
that matter!), but like the Silmarillion, his Celestial Labors were perfect
for the invented words he had on hand.  What amazes me, though, is that
process of "communicability," as this thread wants to call it, didn't stop
at theology; Paul was making up words for television station, and Internet,
and "what the heck."  The problem with writing and thinking in Teonaht is
the same for me as it is for writing and thinking in any language that is
foreign to me, even the one's I know the best, like French and Spanish.
There is the problem of not remembering a word, but by the time you've got
your face in the dictionary, you've got an English word for it in your head.
Had I stayed in Switzerland for three more years, I could have punctured
that wall that always looms for me between translating into a language and
thinking in it.  It was the practice I needed.  For Paul, and for those like
him, his imaginary language is an organic part of himself.  So is Teonaht an
organic part of me, but it's cerebral in so many ways, only parts of it are
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?

Uor, I remembered, though!  I panicked while I was writing the post on the
"alterative."  I couldn't think of it.  Looked in my lexicon, looked in my
penciled dictionary, looked in my on-line adverbs where I keep a list of the
particles for the comparatives... not there.  So I thought I had just never
written it down, and made up the word again for the post, and went and put
it in the on-line lexicon.  Then, I thought to look in my on-line
"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.

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.  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.  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.

>   At first, it blew my mind that Paul has such an immediately accessible
> knowledge of his own language. Now, it blows my mind instead that I do
not.
> I have spent more time "learning" Rhean than I ever did halfassedly
> learning Japanese or Spanish, and yet I seem to have more of a vocabulary
> of those two, committed to memory, than I do of my created language!
>   Is there some kind of mental block that makes one's own constructed
> language harder to learn than a natural one?
Because there are native speakers who will correct you, and for whom it is
necessary to find the right words.  Especially if you are living in their
country.  Also, books to be read in natural languages.  Visual and aural
reinforcement.  How often are you rereading your words over again?

> >How can you think in a grammar without the words?  Teonaht has a big
> >vocabulary that takes practice remembering, and a backwards syntactical
> >structure with lots of exceptions and idiomatic phrases that are
difficult
> >to work out even in an English transcription.
>
>   Easy to think in a grammar without the words. That's how I did the
> translation above: thinking in the Rhean grammar has become easy, but I
> still have to look up the words. I can also think in Omurax's verbless
> grammar, but I've got SFA of a lexicon for it yet. Most of my toying with
> it is done in "Skeletonese", which is essentially an interlinear of Omurax
> grammar with English words filled in. But this becomes more difficult once
> you start adding the hard-to-translate words, like |vamontax| "a deed or
> favour deserving gratitude". I had to make that to translate "I would
> appreciate it if..." Without verbs (except an implied be/become depending
> on the noun's case) it becomes "it would be a vamontax if..."
This sounds so familiar!  I make up shortcuts in Teonaht in order to avoid
relexes like "I would appreciate it if..."  That enriches your language.

> >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.
>
> Mao? Mao Tse-Tung??
> Or Mau from the list?
Yry myeebihs.  Pardon that reprehensible misspelling.

> The problem may be too much TRANSLATION and not enough original pieces in
> the language. I know that's my problem. Paul went and wrote a very large
> piece of work completely in his language. Freed of having to translate the
> peculiarities of English, you'd get to know and better use the
> peculiarities of Teonaht (or substitute one's conlang's name).
See my remarks above.  You have to have more words under your skin first.
The card game.

> M.
>
> agjamad (addendum):
>
> >Fyl krespro uary mal bettai, send ain nicodel elry kare.
> >"Your letter have I now received, and meaningful did I think it."
>
> Well, I guess I have to throw in the Rhean version now, since I'm "so
> izkawaerni yarjutnutin paiyem c'atakom nap c'erkovörom tenabza" (that
> is, "bound by blood-sealed oath to complete every translation exercise").
LOL!!!!

> "I just received your letter and found it very interesting"
> Lai tiler morov anaze, anatruc'ec' c'e k'rudam.
>
> your letter(-ACC) receive-PTP exist-GER, very-interesting be-3SG.PRES
think-
> 1sg
>
> The construction in the first half of the sentence is very hard to
> translate. |morov| is the past (active!) participle of |morak| "receive",
> and means "having recieved". With the verb |anc'ek| "exist", it would mean
> that I am presently in the state of having received the letter. A simple
> past tense "I received your letter" would do fine here, but would lose the
> connotation of "it has just happened and I'm still in that state now". And
> also, |anaze| is the adverbial gerund of |anc'ek|, so the first half
> is "Having (just now) received your letter..." and eliminates the need
> for "and". The second half, something like "very-interesting it-is I-
> think", is more straightforward.
>
> agjamada konz

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."

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