Re: The 2007 Smiley Award Winner: Teonaht

Edgard wrote:
<<
BTW, for not letting this message to be totally off-topic: My conlang,
Ausónya Bháma, is my linguistic credo, and I shape it as the easiest way
(for me) to think about something. It will be very hard for me
creating any
other language, as this one already got all my effort. In this
respect is
easier for me to understand Sally Caves' fidelity than those creating
dozens
of new languages. Once I decided that gold, for instance, is "ausóm",
it is
_really_ 'ausóm', and I am even more sure about that than I was in my
old
days of naive monolingualism. Weird, hm? ; )
 >>

I think it really has to do with one's...not attention span, but
level of satisfaction.  My first language kind of coincided with
the start of my study of linguistics, and my knowledge expanded
by leaps and bounds each month.  Every time I learned something
new, I wanted to try it, and it required a new forum, not an old
language.  The old one was no longer enough to satiate my
conlinguistic appetite.

Also, part of it is that, for me, at least, there was a huge break
when I realized that my first language wasn't good.  Huge.  It
reminds me of the time when I learned that all of my favorite
male singers were actually singing an octave higher than me
when I was singing along with them (this was when I was twelve,
I think).  I realized it, and then tried to sing at their octave, and
couldn't, and suddenly my world changed.  Same thing happened
with my first language.  I forget what it was, but something
made me realize that everything I'd done with my language
was tantamount to a fancy relex of English.  Not the morphology,
or the phonology, or anything, but the *semantics*.  I had words
for "dog" and "canine" (separate words), there was a single word
for "fortify", and its verbal noun was "fortification", with the
same exact meaning as it has in English (a fortified building--not
simply the act of fortifying something).  That was when I realized
I had to start ALL over, and totally rethink the way I looked
at language.  Since then, it's been hard for me to be a one
language man.

Edgar:
<<
Anyway, nice text!
 >>

Thanks!

Oh, since this is on topic, I know it's been a year, but in case
there are some new faces, you should check out Sally's speech
at the first Language Creation Conference.  It's viewable on
Google Video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=-3117774526155284922&q=language+creation+conference

And a shameless plug: LCC2 is less than a week away!  If you're
in the Bay Area, stop by!  It will be well worth your while:

http://conlangs.berkeley.edu/

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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