Re: Re : Re: A Charyan Brothel Song in Teonaht

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Sally Caves wrote:

> Wonderful erudite stuff snipped--
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> > -------------------------------------------
> > Notes
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> > [1] Incidentally, in the interlinear version posted on Conlang, I've
> > made a mistake and glossed e.di as poss.1s, while it should have been
> > glossed as poss.2s, of course.
> >=20
> > --------------------------------------------
> > References
> >=20
> > Astio, Petro. 1881. Grammatica Chariana. Castrae Geminae.
> >=20
> > de Mattos, Teixera. 1937. _la langue denden_. Bruxelles
> >=20
> > Hahn, Otto. 1985. Lehrbuch der Klassischen Chari=E4nischen
> > Schriftsprache, Bonn.
> >=20
> > Herry, Shirley. 1995. 'Denden as a _mischsprache_', _Acta Linguistica
> > Twincastriana_, XV:4 50-73.
> >=20
> > In, Guo-ping. 1998. 'Genitive Constructions', Amsterdam.
> >=20
> > Rolsh, Gerbrandt. 1996. 'Denden as a Pidgin', _Mededelingen van het
> > Instituut voor Vergelijkende Taalwetenschappen_, III: 2 (12-83).
> >=20
> > Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt
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>=20
> Heh heh heh... Boudewijn, this is really terrific!  No wonder you're
> a gamer.  I'm trying to do this sort of thing for a novel I'm writing
> about the confusing discovery of Teonaht and I understand the artful and
> compulsive play that extending the verisimilitude requires!  Issytra
> is only one of my own scholars ... There is also Sendl Brykkabuo
> of the seventies and Araisai Jy from the seventeenth century who left us
> a largely moralizing and outraged commentary on stuff he dug up on the
> Teonim.   LOL!  Keep it up... Issytra will write you again, I'm sure!
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> (Don't tell me you have the actual TEXTS by Gerbrandt Rolsh, for
> instance!)
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Of course not! That's what libraries are for! Perhaps your university
library hasn't taken out a subscription to _Mededelingen_, which doesn't
have a large circulation, and Astio is quite difficult to find - I'm lucky
to have a copy of that work on my own shelves. As for In, I think you
can order his work from that famous Internet bookseller, www.orinoco.com,
although it is, like all books published by John Jozefs, very expensive.
(By the way, a quick look at my references shows me that I've misspelled
Rolsch's name. There should be a _c_ between the _s_ and the _h_.)

> And I want to hear more about your interview.  How did the public get
> wind of Denden?  Are you that "out" about your conlanging?  If so,
> this is very interesting, and I might want to remark on it in my own
> essay on the subject.
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We wanted to start a small society for people with conlangs, the
Nederlands Genootschap voor Linguafictie, so we set out on a publicity
campaign. Following a column in one the better Dutch newspapers, the
NRC-Handelsblad, in which Xipu was quoted, we were invited for two radio
programmes. The first was for the Amsterdam local radio, the second
for a national broadcasting corporation. The next year we published
a yearbook with grammars and bookreviews - it has actually been sold
in a bookshop in Amsterdam. People seemed to regard conlanging as just
another of those peculiar hobbies - like gaming or building cathedrals
from spent matches, and thus there's no reason not to be open about
it. Most reaction that followed on the publicity expressed interest
and curiosity. The NGL was too small to be long-lived, though, and after
that yearbook, it petered out.

I've only had two negative reactions - one I have mentioned before,
by that person who said my languages weren't languages because the
couldn't be used to communicate, and the other by an Esperantist who
was of the opinion that instead of wasting my time by inventing another
language I should use Esperanto. (Note: I don't want to open flamewars
with this anecdote!)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt