Hello again Sally!
> 1) How many of you old- and new-comers started inventing a language
> in isolation from the list?
I did.
>
> 1a) If so, how old were you?
10.
> 1b) Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
Started solitary but grew to involve some of my friends.
> 1b) Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
> esoteric? erotic? religious or mystical?
It was the Transformers language, the language the Transformers spoke on
Cybertron...my hypothesis was that they don't speak English there...
>
> Since the topic of my panel is "the language of mysticism,"
> I'm especially interested in this last.
>
> 2) How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
> Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
Not I.
>
> 3) How many of you, when you were starting out on this on your own,
> did this kind of thing: you have a list of words you want to invent
> new ones for, so you drew di-and polysyllabic words out of the air.
> This is
> what I did when I was new at this and a teenager. Many of these still
> remain vocabulary words in Teonaht, but I've since then learned to build
> up through word roots.
We only ended up with three phrases:
hello: /x:::::::::/
IIRC, this meant goodbye: (alternating hi-lo pitch squeal)
bugger off!: /ananho~::::/
The words and glosses might be mixed up in the above...it's been a long
time...
>
> 4) If so, how important was it that the new word sound "exotic,"
> "beautiful," or
> "suggestive" in some personal way of the word you wanted it to stand
> for?
It had to sound like a race of robots would speak it
>
> 5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
Since then, I have, many.
>
> 6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
That one, no. Others, yes.
>
> 7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
For me, it is.
>
> 8) A language for a conculture?
That too, some.
>
> 9) How many of you newcomers (and I see a lot of names I don't
> recognize
> in the six months I've been away) heard of the list first and thought--
> Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
>
> 10) What is your definition of a mystical language? Would any of you
> characterize your conlang as such?
>
I dunno...to me mystical languages are Old Norse and Church Slavic...Latin
by proxy...
-------ferko
Ferenc Gy. Valoczy
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