Re: NPR interview

Thank you, Matt, for a wonderful review of
the segment!  How nice of you!  How nice of
all of you to write in.  Matt, please remind me
of the "New Times" piece on Elvish that you've
recently done.  Did you inform me about this?
Where can I/we read this?

Oh!  And I got a post from someone on the
list who expected to hear my nom de plume,
"Sally Caves," and instead heard a stranger's
name:  Sarah Higley.  That's still me!

I was delighted and nervous to hear myself.  In
fact, I felt nauseated at breakfast, and the
half-hour wait, as Chris and I were poised at the
stereo system, tapes ready to roll, was grueling.  All
in all, I think it was pretty good.  There was only
one omission that really got to me.  I was never
identified, along with Professor Gregory Carlson,
as a colleague and associate professor at the
University of Rochester, in the English department.
This was all revealed in the longer interview that I
gave to Brenda, along with my being a medievalist,
another point that I share in common with JRRT.
Now I know they named me as a professor, but my
department wasn't named, even my university.  It
was the Full Professor and linguist that got the affiliation
credit and "valorized" my "hobby" for me.  A lot of that
material about model-making and miniatures was
information that I had given to Brenda, too.  I
think she wanted to showcase me as creator and him
as critic, but I had thought I had reminded her that I
wanted to be billed as my professional, rather than my
conlanging, self.  I called her, and she's going to add a
tag onto the WXXI broadcast on 91.5 this coming
Wednesday (7:45 am) and the following Saturday (about
9:30am) that will announce my professional specialization
and my T. website.  I wrote David Dvorkin, ombudsman
at NPR, and asked if it were possible for the one who wrote
the written blurb on the website to add "associate professor of
English at the UR" to my name.  I don't think he's going
to get to that any time soon! <G>

However, this afternoon I got four emails at my UR e-address
from people all over the nation, two of whom admitted to
being secret conlangers themselves.  They want to be put
in touch with the group.  How's that?  I guess the interested
ones can put two and two together!

What got left out:  a lot of talk on my part about Tolkien,
about Hildegard, about the list, about Irina's Translation
Relay Idea.  The item about how to say "Were you finally
able to get the car started" had a different context.  I was
remarking that I wanted Teonaht to be a practical language,
and to go one better than Tolkien, who had complained
in his essay that his languages had no real circulation in
the human world, and couldn't really be used for mundane
speech.  "Eventually, you're going to have to be able to say
something like 'have you managed to get the car started?'"
I told Brenda.  But it's really tough to take a half-hour interview
and boil it down to four minutes.  I thought she did a golden
job of it.

And it *was* originally supposed to tie in with the upcoming
movie!!!

I would really like to know more about Descartes' invented
language.  I know about the philosopher Leibnitz and his,
but Descartes' comes as a surprise to me.  Rumor has it he
made an android replica of his dead daughter.  How sweet
to think that he made a linguistic replica, and a more "logical"
one at that, of his native French.  Was he also trying to
improve on Latin?  Who knows this?  This was Carlson's
contribution.  I'm glad Brenda put the Hildegard on!

Thanks, all of you, for your support!  I couldn't have
done this without you.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (my page)
http://moby.curtin.edu.au/~ausstud/mc/0003/languages.html (my on-line
article)



----- Original Message -----
From: J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 2:45 PM
Subject: NPR interview


> I just heard the RealAudio version of Sally's NPR interview.
> Here's the URL for it:
>
>
> http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=08/5/2001&PrgID=10
>
> The interview portions were great!  Sally/Sarah has a wonderful
> radio voice and spoke very eloquently, making her the ideal
> spokesperson for our little pastime.  I also liked the references
> to Descartes and Hildegard of Bingen (adds a touch of class), and
> the interview with Greg Carlson (a well-known and well-respected
> name in generative linguistics).
>
> The presentation of the subject matter was done very tastefully
> and with respect to those being discussed.  In general, the piece
> was designed to explain conlanging *on its own terms*:  The
> comparisons with model shipbuilding and crossword puzzling, for
> example, were quite apt.  This worked to make the hobby seem less
> strange to the audience, rather than more strange.  Quite unlike
> the recent "New Times" piece on Elvish featuring Marcus Smith and
> myself, which, while entertaining, seemed bent on portraying
> conlangers as a bunch of freaks (extremely intelligent freaks,
> but freaks nonetheless).
>
> In the best NPR tradition, the segment was well constructed and
> surprisingly free of factual errors.  The only 'serious'
> error--for dedicated Tolkien nitpickers, anyway--was that the
> interviewer referred to "The Fellowship of the Ring" as a novel,
> and "The Lord of the Rings" as a trilogy (I was surprised that
> there was no tie-in to the upcoming movies...).  Also, the
> comment about almost every conlanger translating the Babel Text
> was a bit misleading.  But otherwise, a job well done!  The best
> publicity yet for Conlang and for conlanging!
>
> Matt.
>

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