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?
It has been very private most of my life -- My parents and brother knew,
and no one else... While they are not unsympathetic, they do think it a bit
odd... (parents were both professors of French and Spanish literature). My
family was more or less impressed by the effort, but the results were not
that interesting to them, as far as I know. My brother never seemed to care
much at all.

I came out of the closet in the last year or two, since my role as
listowner has made CONLANG come to mind not only as a topic, but as an
example of net-communities that _never_ come to exist in the F2F world
because the density of members is so low...  We can't even manage to have
meetings of more the 4 list members, generally, and that is often related
to travel. (Any CONLANGers in the Bay area? I'll be in SF next weekend.)

I find that mostly people are bemused by it. One friend did surprise me by
having a pretty negative reaction -- it seemed wholly pointless and
essentially impossible to him. But, hey, it may be impossible to complete,
but we have to do it anyway!

>        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
It got me active again, as post-High School, I had many other things
happening, and never had the time for it.

>                b) making it public?
Definitely. CONLANG was the first time I perceived any chance of an
audience for grammars of imaginary langauges. In fact, I felt some pressure
to get a project underwy again, as the web-puvblishing trend took hold in
our group.

>        3)  How many of you, in mentioning your conlang to an
>acquaintance, received a belittling reply?  Condescension?  Disapproval?
A few times. Most people find my interests odd enough, and widely enough
distributed that it's more of a data point, than something worth mocking. I
think people who know me are unlikely to be surprised at my hobby... On the
other hand, I rarely mention it in professional contexts, and sometimes
feel a little naked having put my involvement out there on the web right
next to my "professional" persona.

>        4)  How many of you are:
>
>                c) graduates?
graduate student. Soon to be PhD. Also working and with family, which
lengthens the process..

>        4a) What is your profession, or your desired profession?
Computer scientist. Major interest: theoretical and practical aspects of
electronic textuality, also collaborative writing (thesis topic),
Humanities Computing (I have a good time at ACH conferences even if they
don't impress computer scientists).

There is a temperamental linkage there, clearly.

>        5)  How many of you have invented a language because
>
>                a) you are solely interested in language experiments
>                   and linguistics?
Sort of... I just found that I wanted to combine things when reading
linguistics, and make my own... Tolkien was of course an inspiration as
well, helping to plant the notion that it could be done.

>                        i) for personal experiments...
yes.
>                        ii) because you like participating in the
>                        development of an auxiliary language and its
>                        socio-political effects?
Not really interested. I've become pretty convinced that the practical
problems are unlikely to be solved in getting acceptance of an artificial
IAL. I expect that the IAL of choice will continue to vary as cultural and
economic power vary. Maybe English will crush enough other languages to
remain a stable point, but I suspect that won't last more than some finite
time.

>                b) you are interested in world-building
yes, but I don't do it so much as I would expect... I find that I do the
world building as a part of my fantasy life, and rarely get it written
down. I'm a bad language learner however (embarassing confession), and so I
have to write down the grammars, and sometimes to write programs to work my
morphology and phonology (and generate HTML tables, etc.) because working
them by hand is so error prone.
>                        i) for fiction
Again, it just never seems to get written. Maybe someday.

>                        iii) just for your own amusement?
mostly.

also:

                         iv) I love the idea of cool manuscript books in
unknown langauges and alphabets. My hope is to someday
write/write-and-translate some longer pieces and create hand-made
illustrated books from them.
>
>        5) How many of you take the time to learn another's conlang?
My language learning isn't so hot, but I read the grammars and texts with
interest.

>        6) How many of you are women?
not me.
>        7) Who is lurking period?  [these questions I don't expect
>                public answers to--if any answers--but I ask it anyway
>                to see what happens]
I mostly lurk -- time.

>        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?  I'll protect names if so desired [as though this is
>writing pornography!-- now there's something]
not at all... Now that I've gone public, I like the attention.

>        9) For how many of you is "exoticness" in your invented language
>and absolute must?  How many of you pursue more familiar models... and
>why to both?
I like exoticness, but also perhaps because of my "artlang" predilections,
prefer "naturalistic" languages. I get to balance creation from whole cloth
with  conformance to what we understand of human language universals and
features.

>        9)  FINALLY: what is the appeal of an invented language for you?
>Wherein is its "sexiness"?  Its spirituality?  its sensuality?  What keeps
>you at it?  How does it benefit you?  Does it harm you?  heal you?
I love the way the rules of language surprise me when I work out the
consequences -- I like regular languages where the interaction of phonology
and morphology makes for apparent irregularity -- just as I always liked
irregular verbs in spanish, because most of them weren't _really_ very
irregular, but followed patterns.

When you get a that perfect correspondence of sound to emotional tone of
the projected culture and speakers, or just "the right sound" it's an
emotional kiick. I've been playing with a newunnamed language that uses 3
levels of moraic  length. I'm finding that the variations of length and
reduplication are very beautiful, and look forward to discovering its name
and speakers.

Probably it's a harm because I have other things that I "should" be doing,
but it's a creative outlet that I don't want to give up.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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