Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

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.

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