Re: Conlanging as a personal thing

Sally Caves wrote:

>I would think that "full" communicability would also require a respondent
>who could also read said email.
...In other words, the language needs speakers. There must be both a sender
and a receiver capable of handling the information. This is why nobody buys
videophones.

>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.
  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?

>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..."

>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?

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).

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").

"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

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