Re: CHAT: Conlanging couples

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 04:27:58PM -0400, Stephen DeGrace wrote:
[snip]
> It would be interesting to hear how different people
> frame the hobby to normal humans <g>. I mostly don't
> tell people about it, if I do how I frame it depends
> on the person I'm dealing with. There is usually
> _some_ angle that can serve as a basis of
> understanding.
My not-so-nice approach is to say something to the effect of "oh yeah, I
stumbled across this weird mailing list on the net, where people talk
about artificial languages that they made..." That usually saves my face,
but unfortunately at the expense of the list's reputation :-/

I *did*, however, manage to put it in a nicer way to another friend by
saying that it was for learning more about linguistics. She, being an
English major and a law student, readily accepted that explanation :-)

[snip]
> Now, con-_culturing_, I have been doing since I was,
> oh, four, and this is the first time I have made the
> slightest public mention of it - I don't tell people
> about it, period,
When I was in middle/high school, I had this obsessive behaviour of
creating movies in my mind, and occasionally acting them out with arm
gestures and making odd noises. My dad would tell me to "stop
dramatizing!" I actually have several of those imaginary movies (talk
about ephemereal :-P) revolve around pretty well-developed storylines and
plots.

[snip]
> head and is not written down anywhere, things like the
> names of imaginary cities, provinces and people make
> an excellent source of unguessable passwords that I
> can easily remember :P.
[snip]

Not to mention weird orthographies like my conlang's -- what with embedded
digits, mixed case letters, embedded apostrophes, tildes, and all manner
of unpleasantries -- I actually typed in a question and answer in my
conlang for one of those sites that ask for a question for identifying you
when you lose your password. Imagine the look on somebody's face when he
hacks into my account and gets the question:
        ghi' ni ekaa'su d3 jubi'?

Beauty :-)


T

--
Too many people have open minds but closed eyes.

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