Re: Literacy in conscripts?

On Sun, 23 Jan 2000, FFlores wrote:

> Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:
>
> > I was writing some things out in the Saalangal script (to be officially
> > named), and i got to wondering, for those of you who have constructed
> > scripts to go with your languages, how literate are you in writing that
> > script?
>
> I write at a fairly good speed in Eqalar. Not at blazing speed,
> or the way a native would, but I don't suddenly forget letters
> or stop to think.
>
> Reading is another thing; I actually have to decipher things.
> The worst problem, of course, is that I'm the only writer (in
> this universe), so I can't practice: after I've read the first
> syllables with difficulty, I remember the whole sentence because
> I myself wrote it, and I don't really read anymore.
As an undergraduate, I once requested a book on interlibrary
loan; it arrived just after I had found out that I had been
accepted to the graduate program at the University of Arizona.
Coincidentally, the book that had come in on interlibrary loan
was from the University of Arizona. In the back cover, I wrote a
short congratulatory sentence (lightly and in pencil!) to
myself in a script I had invented a couple of years before. By
the time I arrived in Tucson, I had forgotten all about the
sentence until one day, about two months later, I saw the book
while browsing in the stacks. I remembered that I had written a
little message to myself and looked at it. I found that I could
read it with relatively little difficulty.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu