poll 30? (long...Sal at her most voluble)

In glorious fullness!  I sometimes embarrass myself, And!. :)   I'm
interested too in seeing yours, since your question hits (at least for me)
on aspects of myself and my enthusiasm that I sometimes dislike.

Sally
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat, et r.

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>

> I'm sure it would be interesting to see yours, Sally, in glorious
> fullness. So maybe people who sent longer responses might share
> them with the list....
Moi:
Here's Peter's looooong reply.  Good luck moving, Peter, and this has been a
terrific series.  Now of course we will burden you with a request to put
these on-line.  But we'll wait till you've gotten settled and taken a
vacation!

Peter uarlo krespr:

>>
Twenty-two of you responded, and now I remember why I usually don't permit
open-ended questions. :) Almost everyone had something good to say, but this
is supposed to be a précis, not the whole essay itself. But...since this may
be the last Poll, we might as well go out with a bang, right? So while not
quoting everyone, I won't worry about length. Think of it as a poll digest.
:)
        Here is a rough categorization of what people find burdensome and/or
grievous
with constructing a language:
        Creating vocabulary: 5
        Placing material on the Web: 4
        Syntax: 3
        Worldview: 2
        Creating a corpus of literature: 1
        Grammar: 1
        Phonology: 1
        Finding research material: 1
        The Conlang list itself: 1
        Balance: 1
        Lack of progress: 1
        Documentation: 1
<<

Sally again:  I observe that the greatest grief seems to be in vocabulary
building and documenting the language on-line.  That has been the hardest
part for me.  The stuff that's on-line for Teonaht now was the product of
one summer's work in 1998.  To get the lexicon up in a state of completion
that satisfies me will take another few summers, which I don't have time
for.  This grieves me.

>>
        Arnt Johansen sagely observed, "I think for many conlangers, what
feels most
burdensome is what they feel has to be done on their language, but aren't
very interested in. For instance, a conlanger who likes phonology a lot,
will
have a ball drawing up the sound system of his or her language, but the
other
parts of the language, that is necessary for it to become complete, may feel
like drudgery." This doesn't account for all cases, but it still is a
significant point. Specifically, in your own words:

        Creating vocabulary:
        Estel Telcontar is troubled: "Matching sound to meaning.  I can make
up
phonologies, I can decide what sorts of grammar and syntax I want, I can
decide what meanings I want words to have, but I just can't seem to decide
which sounds to match to which meanings, whether for vocabulary or for
affixes."
<<

Ditto.  The more words I create, with more bases, the less autonomic control
I have over new words.  So combining bases sometimes gives me words that
don't seem to match meaning in my limbic system.

>>
        Mau Rauszer murmers: "Teaching, learning the words and writing the
grammar
book! Okay, actually in the creation of the conlang, for me the word
building
is the worst. But just because I often forget that I already made a word for
that idea and I make another one."
<<

I've done that.  What a great word for "lamp"!  Oh,  I have a word for
"lamp."  Now what do I do?  Make it an oil lamp?

>>
       Placing material on the Web/Archiving material:
        Robert Wilson wistfully writes: "Probably putting stuff on my web
site... I
hand-code all my html and I'm using a mail2ftp server to upload files, so
it's sort of difficult to get my notes (on paper) organized, html-ized, and
uploaded..."
<<

EXACTAMUNDO!  Not having a proper database that will allow me to switch
words instantaneously from Teonaht English to English Teonaht.  Having to
handplace everything.

>>
        Jan van Steenbergen laments: "Probably the making of websites for my
languages. To me, that is an important secondary purpose of conlanging, but
I
don't really like working on websites. It is a time-consuming activity, that
has little in common with the real conlanging process. The same thing also
applies to composing music BTW: after writing the last note, I need to write
a readable score in a sculptured handwriting, and that can be days of hard
work without any artistic satisfaction."
<<

Hey, Jan.  I know that one, too.  Writing the score down so that it's
"pretty" and others can read it.  I hate it I hate it I hate it.  And now
voluble me:

>>
        Sally Caves cries: "Most burdensome:  the fact that most of Teonaht
exists in
a handwritten notebook that dates back to 1969, and a lot of the words are
obsolete.  The fact that I can't seem to stick to any system in getting the
old words into my teoeng.html file.  I've tried the alphabetical route,
starting with "A." Then I lose my place.  Start with Z and work back.  Lose
my place.  I've made a huge taxonomy of words in English that are grouped
according to categories."
<<

I think for me, the creativity has mostly been with pencil and paper.  There
are some advantages, though, to putting up an on-line lexicon: the "search"
function.  The Teonaht-English lexicon puts the Teonaht words first and in
alphabetical order, but I can search for the English words, if I've
forgotten the Teonaht (an increasing annoyance as the lexicon grows), I can
search for it far more efficiently than I can through a paper version.

>>
Sally also wrote a *lot* more, and hopefully she'll
repost it, as it is rather insightful and many would identify with it.
<<

Well, this is what I bemoaned in a moment of confession:

Along with amazement and delight, grief and burden have been a part of
Teonaht for forty years for me.  Which aspects are the most burdensome?
Almost all of them, including the obsessive joy I take in it.

First of all, the isolation.  For decades, there seemed no point in doing
it, except that something compelled me to finish an unfinishable job.  I
would snatch time to work at it, abandon it for years altogether, then spend
weeks in lucubration, laboring into the wee hours of the night sorting,
filing, inventing, analyzing--everything that Marina Yaguello described as
"lunatic"--and keeping it all secret.  I would get sick to my stomach and
have headaches.  The finishing line seemed further away than ever.  When I
read Tolkien's "A Secret Vice," I sat up and paid attention.  Whoa! This I
recognize. "Higher developments" kept under close wraps.

Second of all, the freedom from isolation.  I had a purpose, finally, in
pursuing this project when I found CONLANG, and the list sharpened my
competitive and expressive instincts.  I taught myself html so that I could
showcase Teonaht.  I bought books on linguistics so that I could better
understand in more up-to-date terms what I was doing.  T's "active" elements
were honed.  I became more compulsive than ever.  And still no nearer my
goal of completion.  In fact, the finishing line moved even further off.  A
mountain had blocked it and stretched it out.  Now there were games to play,
Teach Yourself Books to write, paintings to paint and scan in, web space to
buy and pay a monthly fee on, gods to describe, stories to express in
Teonaht.  This has been probably the single most ambitious thing I have done
in my adult career, next to the book that won me tenure.  Teonaht is a
"book" that will never promote me.  A burden: that I should be writing
novels and short stories.  And a new book on something medieval.  I have a
talent for writing in ENGLISH.

Thirdly: the sense that I was no longer so unique.  When I discovered
Tolkien at the age of fourteen, I had the same mixed feelings: delight and
let down.  Here was a writer who put my meager efforts into shade.  I got on
CONLANG, and the feelings were strangely similar.  Joy, amazement, and let
down.  The efficiencies of Tokana and other neatly described languages made
my Teonaht feel gargantuan and unwieldy.   I decided to revel in Teonaht's
maggelities.  [I made some terrific friends whose faces I have only recently
seen.  I have been helped immensely, and I have learned a lot about
linguistics.   I wish I had the dedication to study somebody else's conlang
and get proficiency.]

VOCABULARY BUILDING AND SHOWCASING:
I made a huge taxonomy of words in English that are grouped according to
categories.  The problem of having to fill them in by sorting through what
is up on the Teonaht-English page and what is in the notebook or what is in
my memory [OR WHAT IS STILL NOT THERE!] is killing me.  The taxonomy,
modeled after Hildegard's--wherein I start with the body and move from that
to the family, and move from that to the house, and move from that to the
garden, and move from that to the farm, and move from that to cuisine (a
huge and obsessive category), and move from that to the city, and all the
careers in the city, and all the professions in the city, and the major
terms for government and war and religion and
medicine and art--has gotten out of hand.  It's definitely not ready yet for
posting on a page.

The fact that my once sharp memory is dulling with age and information
overload, so that I need to consult my handwritten dictionaries more often;
that I ought to have all of my Teonaht words memorized.  That the newest
words I've made up are also the most forgettable.  That there are still some
basic words that I don't have.  Like "beach."  How can I not have "beach"?

Okay, that was my long beef.  In its "glorious fullness."  :)

>>
        Syntax:
        David Peterson kvetches: "I'll tell you what I hate: Syntax.   I
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE syntax! If it were up to me, it wouldn't
exist.   I spend hours and hours making a perfect, naturalistic phonology,
and an orthography to go with it (and I always create a font for the
orthography, which, believe you me, takes many more hours), spend precious,
precious class time creating morphological systems (what else are you
supposed to do in class?   [Especially when that class is SYNTAX!!!]),
deciding whether I'm using too much or too little, etc., and vocabulary
design--my favorite part--is a life-long process.   But syntax?!   I'll
choose a word order, but beyond that, what can they expect of me!?   I'm a
mere mortal: Give me my dignity!   Not that I think it's unimportant, or
less
important than the rest.   It's quite possibly the *most* important
structural aspect.   But, to create it?!"
        Roger Mills, still stuck in the Stone Age of Linguistics :), mourns:
"SYNTAX,
aargh.  Although I was in grad school when Chomskian TG was in full bray,
and
although I managed to manipulate it reasonably well then, it never struck me
as a coherent way to describe a language. OTOH I haven't kept up with
changes
in the field of syntactical analysis/description, so to my chagrin I had to
fall back on late 19th/early 20th C. models for the description of Kash.
Well, I think it worked, but I feel somewhat embarassed professionally not
to have done something more "modern.""
<<

I can relate, Roger... my models for language formation were decidedly
"Victorian," especially in the formative years of Teonaht:  Handbooks on Old
English, D. Simon Evans' Middle Welsh Grammar, Thurneyson's Old Irish
Grammar and Reader, Gordon's Old Icelandic Grammar and Reader, Latin
grammars... Just getting Trask's _A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in
Linguistics_ was a breakthrough for me in 1999.  So was seeing Matt
Pearson's paper grammar for Tokana.

>>
        Worldview:
        Sylvia Sotomayor sobs: "Reconciling my supposedly non-human language
with the
very human assumptions in translation exercises. I don't yet have a clear
enough picture of how my people think and act to make cultural translations,
yet occasionally I come across something that I really want to translate.
Related to this is generating vocabulary. Would they have a word for that?"
        Likewise, Chris Rodrigues rails: "The part of conlanging that is
hardest for
me is understanding the modus operandi, the weltanschauung of my conlang.
Sure, I can come up with new words, idioms, constructs, but I have to ask
myself, "Would they actually say it this way?" That leads me into
conculturing so that I can understand how their language proceeds from their
culture, and that is a slow process -- a tedious process when ideas are not
at the ready, upon which vocab generation must wait; and if I want to
translate something, then that has to wait upon vocabulary generation. My
own
humanness is holding me back in creating this alien language."
<<

Why I turned the heaven cats into the Teonim.  Why I stuck with a more or
less human model.

>>
        Creating a corpus of literature:
        H.S. Teoh grumbles: "Corpus building. I was about to say lexicon,
but I
changed my mind because although it is tedious, I nevertheless have a lot of
fun making up new words. But it is the corpus which is burdensome; I am not
a
good writer, and my few attempts at writing a story in Ebisedian (i.e.
directly not translating from English) fell flat on their faces."
<<

It's still so easy to write the English first and translate into Teonaht.  I
have to resist that.  You're congratuled for your attempts.  But I have to
see where I'm going, and I still think mostly in English, and not in
Teonaht.  Sigh.

>>
        Grammar:
        Tristan McLeay moans: "Grammar, though. It's hard; there are so many
things
to make, and I only get a vague idea of what I want to do next when I decide
that «no, I really want to do something else», or, «no, this is becoming too
much like English», or, «no, this is too regular for my taste. ARRGHH!». And
so in the end I can never get beyond a rough sketch of the stuff like
normal word-order..."

        Phonology:
        Garrett Jones whimpers: "If I had to pick one though, I'd say
phonology,
since I usually pick a simple 1 for 1 system with no allophony or
alternations for my conlang/s since the other aspects of languages are more
interesting than laboring over sound systems. As far as the other aspects
go,
the parts that require the most effort (which includes more grief!) are the
most fun and fulfilling in the end, so I like them the best."

        Finding research material:
        Danny Wier sighs: "For me, it's the acquisition of materials for
research,
such as books on languages and linguistics. Since my intent is to create
"realistic" conlangs that obey linguistic universals (while stretching the
limits as much as possible). It's a matter of knowing the rules so I can
break them. Tech in particular is modeled after the great classical
languages
and reconstructed proto-languages -- requiring a great deal of knowledge
about both, and occasionally the purchase of expensive and sometimes
hard-to-find books to acquire this knowledge."

        The Conlang list itself:
        Hanuman Zhang sputters: "The massive tonnage of email on the Conlang
list (so
much intriguing email and so lil time to reaaaally read them in-depth... hey
I have other interests too..."
        Can I hear an "Amen," brothers and sisters?

        Balance:
        Carlos Thompson whines: "I was inclined to say vocabulary but it is
actually
balance.  Trying to find the balance in having a concise yet expresive
language in which the most simple things can be said is frustrating.  This
is
what actually aborts most of my conlang sketches."

        Lack of progress:
        Camilla Drefvenborg gripes: "I find that my answer is word creation.
Strange,
since it's the part which I love the most. But wanting to actually use
the language for all manner of things, I find my lack of  progress on
the dictionary to be my main irritant...
        "The only part of conlanging I can think of which causes me actual
grief is
my current inability to with comfort participate in complex translation
exercises. Or, in other words, my general rate of progress. Or, in truth, my
impatience."
<<

Yeah, patience and perseverence seem to be the ticket.  Or obsessive
compulsive disorder. :)

>>
        Documentation:
        And Rosta ruminates: "The gigantic yawning gulf between invention
and
publication. The invention will not feel right to me until it is published:
it
feels somewhat fictitious, for though many of heard of Livagian, few have
glimpsed any of it. But the effort of documenting it in an intellgible and
publishable way is immense, is infinitely less rewarding than the invention,
and takes time away from the invention."
<<

Okay, this is what clinches it for me.  The main thing I'm hearing is
vocabulary building, and documentation/publication.  Estel Telcontar, Mau
Rauszer, Camilla Drefvenborg, and I find the vocabulary building the
hardest; Robert Wilson, Jan van Steenbergen, And Rosta, and I, again, find
putting it up on the web in any kind of completion onerous.  However, I
don't find that it takes away from the creative process... it can solidify
that process, and then make it harder for you to undo it.

>>
        Well, there's the very long-winded Poll by Email No. 30.
<<

Which I've made even longer.

>>
Thanks to everyone
who participated, thanks for all your insights. I hope in some small way,
you
all benefited from this exercise.
<<

Thank you, Peter, for your hard work on this, and for putting up with us. :)
We are all grateful.

Sal
Eskkoat
etc.

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