Re: Naming the conlang

Welcome, Scotto, to the list! How long have you been doing this solo and when and how
did you hear of CONLANG? I started when I was prepubescent, and only found out
about this community in 1998.

I'll weigh in here on naming: Teonaht began as the name of a place, Teon, invented
by my childhood self to resemble "Siam," a concept I fell in love with when I
saw _The King and I_ and that impressive Thai dance version of _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. I knew I couldn't just borrow the (now obsolete) name of the country,
but I could make something like it--thus Teon came to mind, with an emphasis on
the second syllable: /te'on/. In my salad days, it was a world of flying cats
until I REALLY hit puberty, in which these magical creatures become gods and
mascots, giving way to a more human and sexually appealing race. Well before
that time, the language of Teon had become "Teonian," after "Parisian,"
"Martian," "Californian," "Roumanian," and all the -ian adjectival endings I
was aware of. Later on, when I became more "sophis," I just merged Teon with
the word for "land": hea, so "Teonhea," which now just meant the country of
Teon, and the adjectival turned into "Teonaht." This was still in my salad
days. Boringly, the word "Teonaht" can refer not only to the language but to
anything of or manufactured in Teonhea, just like "Roumanian," "Martian,"
"Californian," "Parisian"... But a Teonaht individual is called a Teonivar, and
the Teonaht people are the Teonim. I was probably blindly copying the Hebrew
there, because the similarity only struck me much later.

Teonaht and its people is a long, baroque, blind, "accretive," long-winded and
obsessional invention that has occupied me on and off for almost forty years.
Join the club!

:)
Sally
Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an
"The gods have retractible claws"
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/whatsteo.html

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Scotto Hlad 
  To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU 
  Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 7:18 PM
  Subject: Naming the conlang


 Hello everyone. I am just joining this group and look forward to talking with
others with similar interests.

 Ok I'm sure that here is another topic that has been discussed so many times
that everyone is groaning yet again. That being said, I have fraternal twin
conlangs being developed, one a Romance language and the second an a-priori
languge.

 I am the parent of 4 children and recall well the delight of volleying back
and forth with the mother of my children over names. There would be no list
that one can reference anywhere online that gives the latest names that people
a chosing for their infant conlangs.

 My question is how have others named their languages? Dare I ask what the
derivation of the names of various languages is. The first conlang I ever
developed (sometime in the last millenium) was called "Kadingu" which meant
"the tongue." I understand as well that at least some of the aboriginal
languages of North American are simply derived from the word for "people." I
believe that Dene is an example: Dene just means "the people."

 I don't want to name my baby romance somthing like "Romanza" or "Ladino" or
something so obvious. My a-priori language will probably derive from the word
for tongue or people.

 I'd really like to see how other colangers have wrestled with this and arrived
at their conclusions.

  Thanks,
  Scotto