Re: CHAT: Which world? Which culture?

On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 01:55:34AM +0200, Harald Stoiber wrote:

> It is said that language is a mirror of its speaker's culture. In fact, this
> sounds so very true to me that I am even creating an entire world for
> my current conlang. On the other hand it seems to me that there are
> people on this list who don't create cultures when they create languages.
> So my question to those fellow conlangers would be: Which culture do
> you mirror into your conlangs? Your native one? Another existing culture
> that you deliberately choose? Or some ancient culture? Just curious...
> *smile*
Well... I don't construct an explicit culture.  But each of my conlangs
has a "flavor", and for half of them I have an image of the speakers.
The speakers of my conlang sketch tekem, for example, are stone-age or
close to it.

And when I don't have an image of the speaker, I'm still generally basing
it on something.  merechi is based on the naive paradise of a 13-year-old
girl.  It's not very coherent.  But its culture could be said to be that
of me, age 13, minus anything I found unpleasant or mundane, with some
later additions.

Actually, one of the stranger things it seems to me is that I even *have*
images of the speakers of my brief language sketches.  I didn't set out
to imagine the speakers.  If I were to try to flesh out the cultures, I'm
sure it would all go wrong and become forced and unnatural.

I suppose the cultural images spontaneously generate when I write sentences
in the language and get a mental picture of the event the sentence is
describing.

Amanda

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