Re: Conlang Coat of Arms

Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@R...>
> wrote:
>
>
>>Argent. In chief, a quill gules. In base, an anvil sable. The motto,
>>"accusativum per prefice indicabo".
>
>
> LOL, the motto is perfect.  =)
>
>
It has a serious background.  JRRT writes in "A Secret Vice"

# I shall never forget a little man - smaller than myself
# - whose name I have forgotten, revealing himself by
# accident as a devotee, in a moment of extreme ennui, in
# a dirty wet marquee filled with trestle tables smelling
# of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and
# wet creatures. We were listening to somebody lecturing
# on map-reading, or camp-hygiene, or the art of sticking
# a fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling)
# bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were
# trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English,
# and voice, is penetrating. The man next to me said
# suddenly in a dreamy voice: 'Yes, I think I shall
# express the accusative case by a prefix!'
#
# A memorable remark! Of course by repeating it I have let
# the cat, so carefully hidden, out of its bag, or at
# least revealed the whiskers. But we won't bother about
# that for a moment. Just consider the splendour of the
# words! 'I shall express the accusative case.'
# Magnificent! Not 'it is expressed', nor even the more
# shambling 'it is sometimes expressed', nor the grim 'you
# must learn how it is expressed'. What a pondering of
# alternatives within one's choice before the final
# decision in favour of the daring and unusual prefix, so
# personal, so attractive; the final solution of some
# element in a design that had hitherto proved refractory.
# Here were no base considerations of the 'practical', the
# easiest for the 'modern mind', or for the million - only
# a question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal
# pleasure, a private sense of fitness.
#
# As he said his words the little man's smile was full of
# a great delight, as of a poet or painter seeing suddenly
# the solution of a hitherto clumsy passage. Yet he proved
# as close as an oyster. I never gathered any further
# details of his secret grammar; and military arrangements
# soon separated us never to meet again (up to now at any
# rate). But I gathered that this queer creature -ever
# afterwards a little bashful after inadvertently
# revealing his secret - cheered and comforted himself in
# the tedium and squalors of 'training under canvas' by
# composing a language, a personal system and symphony
# that no else was to study or to hear. Whether he did
# this in his head (as only the great masters can), or on
# paper, I never knew. It is incidentally one of the
# attractions of this hobby that it needs so little
# apparatus! How far he ever proceeded in his composition,
# I never heard. Probably he was blown to bits in the very
# moment of deciding upon some ravishing method of
# indicating the subjunctive. Wars are not favourable to
# delicate pleasures.
#

--

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)