Re: Lunatic Survey

> THE SURVEY:
>
>         1)  To what extent is your conlang an "intensely peersonal"
> pursuit--one that you don't often reveal to people other than
> conlangers?
My conlanging is not private, but I don't discuss it too much either.My
family (including my boyfriend) know that I'm a conlanger, but they've
shown zero interest in the actual projects.  Same thing with most of my
friends.  So I don't discuss my conlangs with them much, and I often
find
myself feeling embarrased when I'm 'caught' working on them - even by
people who know that it's one of my major hobbies.

A couple years ago I 'outed' myself to my friends, and to my colleagues
in the linguistics department here at UCLA, when I got a job designing
a conlang for a short-lived TV show called "Dark Skies".  That project
excited quite a bit of interest at the time (probably because I got
*paid* for it).  However, that interest consisted mostly of questions
about what it was like to work for Hollywood, etc., rather than interest

in the details of the conlang itself - other than a few basic questions
like "what language(s) is it based on?" and such.

Much less interest has been excited by Tokana, which I consider far and
away a better conlang than the "Dark Skies" language.  One of my fellow
grad students in the department once 'caught' me working on my Tokana
dictionary and asked me a few typological questions about it (basic word

order, is it ergative?, etc.).  I guess that's the only time a non-
conlanger has ever asked me specific, intelligent questions about
Tokana.
It felt very strange, almost like I was baring my soul.


>         2)  If so, to what extent do you feel that the listserv
> "Conlang"
> has given you a _raison d'etre_ for
>                 a) pursuing your invented language
>                 b) making it public?
As other people have remarked, CONLANG serves not only to provide a
forum
for sharing ideas and projects, but also to provide emotional support.
I thank the internet for allowing us to build a virtual community for
a hobby which is rare enough that face-to-face contacts are often
not feasible.  I've been a member of CONLANG for the last five years,
and have loved every minute of it (the occasional flame-war
notwithstanding).


>         3)  How many of you, in mentioning your conlang to an
> acquaintance, received a belittling reply?  Condescension?
> Disapproval?
I once received a very violent reaction from an acquaintance (actually,
he was my host-father when I was an exchange student in Sweden).  He
accused me in the strongest possible terms of being out of touch with
reality and guilty of the worst kind of mental masturbation.  Being
young, I was unable to defend myself against such an indictment.
(I have since come to realise that "mental masturbation", which sounds
like the worst crime in the book, is nothing more than an insulting
term for contemplation, used by ignorant people who do not understand
the importance of contemplation to creativity and good mental health.)

Other people's reactions have run the gamut from mild bemusement to
complete lack of comprehension.  Most people, upon hearing that I work
on 'invented languages', simply cannot think of an intelligent response.

I encounter a similar reaction when I tell people I'm a linguist.  The
very concept eludes them.

To answer question (4), I am a grad student working on my PhD in
Linguistics.  I hope to get a job teaching and doing research, but the
job market is depressingly tight these days.

To answer question (5), my interest is almost exclusively in artlangs
rather than IALs.  Although I credit Esperanto (as well as Tolkien) with

introducing my to the concept of conlanging, I have to say that I find
international language projects rather dull.  I'm too fond of
idiosyncrasy
and irrationality, I guess.

On the other hand, I'm not much of a world-builder either, although I
find the concept of world-building highly compelling, and am fond of
invented worlds of all kinds (excepting fantasy worlds of the swords &
sorcery or 'Tolkien-clone' variety).  In general, my invented worlds
are less fleshed out, more mercurial, than my conlangs.  Although I
have developed a cultural and historical-geographical context for
Tokana, the details of that context remain pretty vague when compared
with the details of Tokana grammar.

I would say that I construct conlangs both to fulfill an inborn
artistic impulse, and to test out various ideas pertaining to the
theory of the syntactic structure of natlangs.  Developing Tokana (and
other more minor projects) has helped me explore a number of topics
within syntactic theory, including the relationship between discourse
and word order, the nature of case-marking systems, and the argument
structure of verbs.

When doing my linguistics work, I often find it useful to construct
little conlang models to test theories of mine.  For instance, in order
to test the hypothesis that Malagasy (the language I'm writing my
dissertation on) has properties X, Y, and Z, I might construct a simple
conlang which has those properties, and then play around with it to see
if it behaves like Malagasy.  Such thought experiments often prove quite

enlightening, I find...

I generally try to keep my conlangs as naturalistic as possible.  As I
explain in the introduction to the Tokana Reference Grammar, Tokana is
intended to conform to what we know - or what I think we know - about
universal properties of human language.  Though I sometimes 'bend the
rules' for the sake of originality, in general Tokana is (I think) a
fairly 'believable' construction, from a typological point of view.


>            8) Which of you would give me permission to (or object to)
> my
> mentioning your conlang and webpage (if any) at a convention, in an
> academic article?
Yes, of course!

And to answer your final question:  On top of the need to express
myself artistically through the medium of invented languages, I find
conlanging rather soothing.  During moments of stress or boredom, I
often distract myself by contemplating details of Tokana case-marking,
or by inventing new and much-needed vocabulary items, or by mentally
translating passages from books, ads in newspapers, lines of dialogue
from movies, etc..  I suppose that could be considered "retreating into
my own little world", but that's something everyone needs to do from
time to time.  If it isn't conlangs, then it's sports scores or
knitting patterns or something like that...

Well, enough of my blather.  I hope what I've said contributes something

to your survey!

Matt.