Re: LeGuin was Re: Introduction

----- Original Message -----
From: "Padraic Brown" <elemtilas@...>

> --- Ar rhespondent l' Amanda Babcock:
>
> > Yscreus la Sarra la Cavurn:
> >
> > > Ursula Le Guin is said to be a conlanger, but
> > > I have reservations about that, despite some
> > > of the linguistic information
>
> > It's at least as much of a conlang
> > as many of our efforts.
>
> > > but I'm still not convinced that she is as
> > > compulsively dedicated as some of the
> > > rest of us are to the nitty gritty details of
> > > our inventions.
>
> Oy! Since when is compulsive dedication a prereq
> for conlanging? Now, you (Sally) and I are of a
> kind in making a language and working on it for a
> long time. But many of us whip something up, play
> with it a while and then toss it aside like a new
> toy on Christmas. Where's the dedication in that?
> To say nothing of compulsion; apart from the
> compulsion to do it over again with some new
> idea.
Ooh, gods!  may you singular be smacked with a farlarop for what you just
did!  <G> Shame on you, Padraic!  You took a continuous piece of my original
post and you  inserted Amanda's response to it, and then made the rest of my
original post look like a reply to her.  I was educated by Amanda's
information, and modified my views.  But here you make it look as though I
persisted in being unconvinced that Le Guin is a conlanger.

> > > I, for one,
> > > have been working on Teonaht for almost forty
> > > years; it's like a nursing a
> > > child that will never quite grow up.
>
> This is commendable; and inshalla Kerno and
> Talarian will be in a similar state by 2030!
May you still have the madness to be working on it.

> To my way of thinking, that doesn't make T any
> 'more' of a conlang than any of the dozens of
> abandonned conlangs described or named on the
> list - or Le Guin's language. [Mind you, the time
> and effort put into T mean that there's more _in_
> it - that I understand and can to an extent
> appreciate!] It smacks a little bit of classism,
> though: WE are Conlangers because WE are obsessed
> and dedicated to OUR creations; whereas you are a
> mere dilettante, a rank amateur because you don't
> show the same singleminded concentration on the
> activity.
Who is "you" here?  My original post wondered whether Le Guin was the kind
of writer who invented words at the moment for her novels, or if she
actually invented a structure to her languages.  Amanda has instructed me on
this.  I am not making classist distinctions.  My admiration of Ursula Le
Guin knows no bounds.  I'm astonished that she has added conlanging to her
repetoire.  I still don't think that her conlanging outshines her novels as
I said in my most recent post.  Which you haven't read yet.  I still think
that there are some great and very developed conlangs in our own back yard.
I give praise to three of them.  One of them is yours, whose handbound book
I still have that you sent me.  And I still think that my conlang, Teonaht,
has a long way to go before I can easily turn it into Hamlet on my own.

> And if the conlang came about solely to support a
> book, so what? Klingon is no different!
Who cares what starts a conlang?  You've misunderstood me, you've
misrepresented me.  I think I just went from bovvont to rohhont. <g> From
blue to cold.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan sersaht celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting outraged, new roses into the world."

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