Re: Introducing Paul Burgess and his radioactive imagination!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Burgess" <paul@...>


> 3/8/03 10:04:14 AM, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
> wrote:
> but it's sentences
> >like "I don't know how to get my sister to see
> reason!" or "I wish somebody
> >would tell me what channel Law and Order is on" that
> have me scrambling
> >around for the right word order.  And then there's
> "channel" to invent.
>
> Sally...
>
> In Hermetic we would say, "Vopfasicis yo mna dhnampi mna
> vasoth mna is cijvirilis 'mna Lao mna cai Nampo.'"
>
> More or less literally, "Would-that-would-cause-to-know
> to-me somebody the channel the at plays-on-television
> 'Law and Order.'"
>
> At least, that's how it comes to me, right off the top
> of my head. :-)
See?  What did I tell you? :)  So here's my Teonaht version, having invented
a word for "channel," finally-- "channel" is difficult, because it means
"road," it means "conveyance," it means "that which carries," it can mean
"tunnel" for the Teonaht, but what's a tunnel through the air?  "Wave" is
also possible.  What "wave" is Law and Order on?  Or it could be "wing," for
to be on someone's "wing" in Teonaht is be carried somewhere.  So:

    Al     dehsano,     o:l       onwem     den     na      "Law and Order"
nar    kwe    uaffel.
    My     wish,          me     one-may   tell      is
upon   what  wing.

Law and Order:  Elep Mevvyjo
                          Law  Order-and

(ooh, interesting homonym:  reader and lawmaker are expressed by the same
word:  elepmavar, elepmarem.  "One who reads" is also "one who makes laws."
A passive activity associated with an active one.  A reader of laws can also
be a maker of laws.)

> "Vopfasicis" is optative mood, causative aspect, of
> "psiciso," "to think" or "to know." (One of those
> "naive" word roots I came up with at age 13-- Note also
> "mna lao" for "law" or "(imperial) legal code.")
Is Lao a borrowing from "Law"?  I have tons of old root words that have to
be thrown out because they are too "naive," too obviously based on English
or Spanish.  When I was ten, I used to just put "-a" after any word I was
too lazy to think up an original for.  My sister still mocks me for "boxa"
(box) and "cara" (car).  <G>

> If you want to use one of those dang subordinate verbs,
> a more formal way of saying the same thing would be,
> "Vopfasicis yo mna dhnampi mna vasoth 'Laov cai Nampov'
> cijviriliso mna is."
We will encourage you to do interlinears. They're a pain, but necessary for
outsiders! :)

> And the Hermetic term "mna vaso," for "channel" or
> "level," came to me my junior year in college, 1976-77,
> University of Wisconsin-Madison, sitting at the desk in
> my dorm room with a fluorescent light on, while drawing
> a political cartoon about then-president Jimmy Carter.
Your method of retaining a word in your memory reminds me strongly of some
of the mnemonists I've read about, who can memorize lists of unrelated words
by making an immediate association or story about them.  It really is a
talent.  I have a number of words in Teonaht that function that way:  way
back when I was a thirteen, my parents took me to an aptitude testing agency
in California called "The Human Engineering Laboratory" (anybody know
that?).  One of the tests was how well you memorized nonsense words that
were given arbitrary meanings.  I saw that eenoo was lamb, eeba was sheep,
teo was "run" (those are the only ones I can remember).  I thought: "eenoo"
sounds like "new" baby, "eeba" sounds like a sheep bleating, and "teo"
rhymes with "leo" and lions run.  So yno~ became "lamb" in Teonaht, yba
became "sheep" in Teonaht, and teo became "run/flee" in Teonaht, and it was
eventually discovered that the people of Teon were in flight from something.
But in my twenties and thirties, I was amassing so much vocabulary that a
lot of it didn't have the narratives behind it necessary for memorization,
and of course it wasn't a language I was speaking to myself the way you do
your mna Vanantha.  When I joined Conlang, my production and refinement of
Teonaht went way up, but I still would like to be more fluent in it than I
am.  But even natural languages will fade on me if I don't have anyone to
speak them to.

> See, I told you there's often a story associated with
> points of vocabulary and grammar in Hermetic! :-)
That's the way to do it.

> Now I've got to run-- due to my schedule, I doubt I'll
> be back online before Tuesday evening.
Just remember to use the delete button.  You'll have about two hundred or
more messages in your box on Tuesday.  Unless everybody is going on Spring
Break.

> "Icnaothis vacig!"
> ("Take it easy!")
"Vyko!"
(ciao!)


Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoeng.html  <--my posted incomplete
lexicon.  I've added "daughter," "tree," and "although" to it.  One of many
shameless basic omissions.