Re: THEORY: Conlanging as reverse Sapir-Whorf?

> Paul Bennett wrote:
> >
> > I've been talking off-list with Rob Nierse about the Gbwia version of the relay.
> > We got onto the subject of understanding other peoples' conlangs, based on
> > shared experience of having to explain far more than we had thought would be
> > required to the person who followed us on the relay.  We realised (I think) that
> > the features of each of our conlangs had some degree of intrinsic "rightness"
> > and/or "obviousness" within our own mind.
> >
> > I started thinking about Sapir-Whorf (we dont need to discuss the valididty of
> > it -- we've only recently been through that game -- it's just a handy label for
> > a phenomenon that exists, to a greater or lesser extent, within various scopes).
> > I've come to the theory that conlanging express the exact reverse of this
> > theory; i.e. "The way one thinks effects the type of conlang one produces".
> > There's something bigger and deeper lurking there, but I'm only peripherally
> > aware of it and certainly lack the terminology to describe it adequately.
> >
> > Anyone care to jump in and help describe/refine/refute this?

This makes me curious, do people on the list (who work on more than one
conlang) find that most of their conlangs are similar to each other?  I
don't mean in obvious ways, but maybe you really like /p/ and all of you
languages have it (or you really dislike it and none of them have it),
or maybe they all have similar word orders, or are all
isolating/agglutinating/analytic/polysynthetic etc?  I know that my
three favorite conlangs that I work on are all SOV and two of those are
agglutinating, which I admittedly prefer, but I do try to mix in other
elements to other conlangs.  Also, my conlangs have totally different
phonologies.  But maybe that's just because otherwise I would feel
guilty that my conlangs were only relexes of conlangs...<whimper>.
Anyone else?

Nicole

Sorry if you receive this message twice, but I sent it and never
received it myself, then receieved an error, and checked egroups and
it's not there, so I think the original got lost.