Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

M.S. Soderquist wrote:
> Daniel Bowman wrote:
>> I was intrigued by some of the earlier discussion about verbal and
>> pre-verbal (sub-verbal?) thought.  I've found that when I'm actively
>> creating my conlang Angosey, there seems to be more than just
>> superficial,
>> verbalized reasoning going on.  For example, changes in my grammar rarely
>> happen due to foresight.  In other words, the grammer changes "on its
>> own"
>> and I'm left scrambling around trying to figure out how it happened.  The
>> emotive aspect suffix is the best example I have: it just appeared out of
>> nowhere, and I have had to figure out how it works and why it does
>> what it
>> does after the fact.  It's like I have to study my own language
>> sometimes.
>>
>> Just out of curiousity, has that happened to anyone else?
>>
>
> That seems to be a pretty good description of how much of my conlanging
> works. It's about half forward development, and about half reverse
> engineering/description. This was particularly true for ea-luna, which
> was developed first in a deliberate way, but then continued developing
> through use, which left me trying to figure out how to describe things
> that were entirely intuitive for me, such as the differences in meaning
> depending on the order of the tense and aspect bits that come before the
> verb, and what those bits might mean when combined  (since they could
> also be used as stand alone words).  It was sort of like when someone
> asks for the definition of a word, and you can't quite find the right
> way to explain it, but you can use it in a sentence to demonstrate what
> it means.
>
> Mia.
That very much describes my experience with my conlanging as well.  I
often say Alurhsa feels like something that exists in its fully
developed form, and I am "remembering" how to say things, or
"discovering" it, or documenting the grammar and usage.  I find the same
is true of Tariatta now that I've done enough development on that to get
the feel of the language.

Tony

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