Re: Fluency Wish-List (was Re: Ah-ha! New computer, YANC and fluency)

How can I resist?  My top fives:

CONLANGS:

1) Tsolyani:  Pretty much the one that started it all for me.  I've worked
on learning and using it before, but the paucity of texts and prickliness
of many Tekumelophiles has led to me dropping it over and over again.
Compared to modern (say, 1990-) conlangs we know about, it's not all that
exotic or unusual, but given that it dates back to the days of Quenya and
Esperanto, it's pretty remarkable.  (If there are folks interested in
setting up a Tsolyani email chat list, let me know!)

2) Tokana: Well, I'm not sure what Tokana looks like these days, since my
copy of the T.R.G. is several years old, but I'd still like to learn it
well enough to use in speech or writing.  I can't say there's anything
major and specific about it that I like; it's just the accumulation of
small details, irregularities, idioms, and hints at a sociocultural
backdro.  Or, I have to say, it may just be that the quality of its
presentation in the TRG won me over.  It certainly set the standard, for
me.

3) Rikchik.  Okay, obviously I'll never be able to *speak* it, but I'd at
least like to learn how to read and write some things in it.

4) Vilani.  "Essentially Sumerian, as spoken by interstellar tax
collectors and management consultants, pretending to be Aztecs."  A
conlang I got going in a public/collective way and which I don't think
ended up very well served by the process, and specifically not by me.  I
still do enjoy it, though, and (someday!) would like to clean it up and
write things in it.  Or translate things.  "You haven't read Proust until
you've read him in the original Vilani!"

5) Laadan.  While I don't accept much of Elgin's philosophical position,
and Laadan shows its age as far as "anti-Euroclone" conlangs go, I'd still
really like to be able to say I know it.  Especially here at Harvard, home
of the free-range male chauvinist sleazebag.

NATLANGS:  well, work and play are hard to separate here, but just to make
it sporting I'll leave out the ones I'm obliged to know for "professional
purposes".

1) Nahuatl (classical and/or modern).  I laboriously worked my way thorugh
Anderson's "Introduction to Classical Nahuatl" a good ten years ago, and
I'm not sure how much I really learned at the time -- and whatever I did
is pretty well forgotten by now.  It's an aesthetically pleasing language,
aurally and grammatically; there's also quite a lot of interesting texts
from the colonial period to read.

2) Xhosa or Zulu (or, in a pinch, Shona or SiSwati, or some other southern
Bantu language):  Again, this is mostly because I've always liked the way
they tend to sound and look; but from what I've read about them, they're
interesting and different from the I-Eoid & "Altaic"-type languages I've
mostly studied.

3)  Mongol.  Okay, this is slightly cheating, edging into "professional
need" territory -- but, technically, it's not *really* part of what I
study, at least the modern language isn't.  The thing is, though, that I
think Khalkha is exceptionally ugly-sounding, so I really want to learn to
speak good Chakhar or some other Inner Mongolian dialect.

4) Since I've started cheating, well, I'd also like to learn Cantonese.
Which is truly masochistic, considering how much trouble I have dealing
with tones just within Mandarin dialects and accents.  But Cantonese just
sounds more fun.

5) Sumerian.  There's the obvious super-exotic allure, both linguistically
and chronologically (though I guess the latter is under some doubt again,
with these new inscriptions in Egypt?).  But what really intrigues me is
just the process itself of trying to understand the language, whether
phonologically, lexically, or grammatically, when it has to be done
entirely through Akkadian sources (and their own "linguistic" knowledge).
Unfortunately, I don't know any Akkadian, which makes it really, really
hard to "just do Sumerian".  Still, the brief time I've spent in classes
doing Sumerian has been really exciting, seeing how other people went
about learning and using an exotic foreign language 4000 years ago.

Kenji