Re: Introducing Paul Burgess and his radioactive imagination!

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 07:43:09PM -0000, mna_vanantha wrote:
[snip]
> I'm excited, and still rather stunned, to discover that there are so
> many of us.
Deja vu. For years I've been wanting to create a conlang, but was plagued
by self-doubt and questions of "how much can I really do anyway?" Until
one day, while poking around the 'Net for linguistic terms, I stumbled
across CONLANG. Like you, I was quite stunned to discover so many people
have this "vice"! :-)

> The first two or three years I was working on my conlang, I
> never dreamed anyone else in the world constructed languages for the
> sheer joy of it. Then a high school English teacher introduced me to
> Tolkien, and I was just blown away. In the late 1970s, I was in contact
> by mail with two other conlangers. Over the years I've heard a few
> second and third hand rumors of people with constructed languages. (One
> of these turns out to have been Sally, in her NPR interview. Small
> world!)
For me, I've already known that some people (esp. RPGers, probably a
Tolkien influence) like inventing languages; what I was awed by when I
first came to CONLANG was that people went *this* far. I had always
imagined that fictional languages would be invented only as a complement
for fictional settings such as for an RPG, and would only be developed
just enough for that purpose. But I had never imagined that people
actually created highly intricate and detailed languages, such
masterpieces as Sally's Teonaht (which if memory serves me correctly was
one of the webpages that led me to CONLANG) or David's Amman Iar (speaking
of whom...  where *is* our Gray Wizard? I haven't heard from him for a
while now), which are not mere relexifications of English (which was as
far as I thought people would bother to go), but fully developed languages
with a completely individual grammar, lexicon, and "flavor".

> But apart from that, my constructed-language endeavors have been going
> on in their own little "Hermetically sealed" world. Until two weeks ago,
> when I stared at my computer screen, and I said to myself, "Ai, gaimoz
> il yothov dhalvanof vagi ridalcary'avn'ist?" ("What the heck are all
> these websites about, anyway?")
When I first stumbled upon these websites, my reactions were initially
mild amusement (these people have wayyyy too much time on their hands),
then skepticism (sounds like the work of just a handful of weirdos), and
then amazement (when I read the description of Verdurian).

Now the tables have turned, and I find myself known on this list as the
creator of an allegedly fiendishly difficult conlang called Ebisedian,
which is reputed to be the bane of all linguistic sanity. (OK, OK, I'm
exaggerating again... I think Christophe's Maggel is way weirder than
Ebisedian... in fact, we've coined the word "maggellity" as a tribute to
Maggel's ... uh, maggellity. :-P) Anyway, to end my shameless self-plug,
you can find out more about Ebisedian and judge for yourself whether it
deserves its label of obscurity, here:
        http://quickfur.ath.cx:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/tutorial.pdf

[snip]
> I'm glad (and still somewhat stunned) to be here, among so many
> conlangers. Thanks once again to Sally for everything she's done for me!
> And I'd be glad to respond to any questions, e-mails, etc.
[snip]

I think the tradition on this list is to begin by diving in head-first
into any new conlang and launch off to the deep waters of grammatical,
lexical, and otherwise linguistical discussions immediately. :-)


T

--
Today's society is one of specialization: as you grow, you learn more and
more about less and less. Eventually, you know everything about nothing.

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