Re: Apologia Pro Linguis Suis

On Sunday, September 9, 2001, at 08:12 PM, Alfred Wallace wrote:

> My name (as evidenced by the "From" line) is Alfred Wallace, and I've
> been conlanging, after my fashion, for about eight years--since my junior
> year in High School in St. Louis, Missouri.  My first conlang--"Alferanto"
> --was inspired by an assignment for trigonometry:  Write an ode to
> 30-60-90 triangles.  I couldn't really think of one--I was determined to
> make it rhyme--so I switched languages.  French didn't work either, so I
> broke down and came up with a language of my own.  It was more or less a
> ripoff of Esperanto, but in the end I had enough for the masterful piece
> of rym dogerel.  (It, and Alferanto, have since been lost.  An extinct
> Conlang?)  What I was really proud of was the script I devised for it,
> which I continue to use--it's faster and clearer than my Roman penmanship.
>
<choke/g>  In Stanford's teacher ed program we were bombarded this summer
with "literacy strategies" to be incorporated into *any* classroom, yes,
even math.  Math poetry was one of them.  I hadn't realized it could be,
um, so fruitful for conlang rather than math-learning purposes!  :-)  Any
chance you have a scacn of that script online anywhere?  I'd love to see
it.  (I confess I have an ulterior motive, as my own Roman penmanship is
pretty godawful...)

> Most of my "conlangs" are satires of the auxlang business.  I've imagined
> myself the head of a company, "Wallace Language Associates," which goes
> around doing contract work for various odd people who, for whatever
> reason, want languages made for them.  (Details, sort of, follow in the
> Ethnologue entries below.)  I approach conlanging with a specific idea in
> mind, such as "What would a language which maximized nuanced speech be
> like?" (This is my current project) or "What kind of language would a
> nationalist dictatorship want?" (The genesis of "Nuremberg," a project
> for the mythical Roderick Spode Party of National Emergency and Renewal)
> and then go do it.  I toy with the
[snip]
What a clever idea!  :-)  It sounds like you must be having a lot of fun.
Not to mention thinking, as a side-effect, about a variety of issues,
humorous, dictatorial, or otherwise.  I have to admit they gave me a few
chuckles.  ^_^

Yoon Ha Lee