Re: Language and "mysticism," whatever that is.

On Sat, 28 Apr 2001 10:33:36 -0700, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
wrote:

>1)  How many of you old- and new-comers started inventing a language
>in isolation from the list?
>
>        1a)  If so, how old were you?
I would have been around 14 or so. My oldest Olaetian documents are
undated, but I estimate that I probably started putting the language
together around 1978 or 1979. The earliest dated Olaetian text is from
1980.

>        1b)  Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
Solitary.

>        1b)  Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
>                esoteric?  erotic? religious or mystical?
I didn't think much about those sorts of things at that age. Well, at least
not with respect to conlanging.

>                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!
>
>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.
Yes, there's some of that in Olaetian and especially Niskloz. I have this
20-page word list with 33 words on each page, and six columns for Olaetian,
Niskloz (then spelled "Neeskläz"), Olaeyayc (a long-disused relative of
Olaetian), Rynnan, Deverrin, and Sari ... well, I only finished the
Olaetian and Niskloz columns and left a lot of blanks in the other ones,
but here are a few examples chosen to illustrate how polysyllabic these
words could get. (Note: these are the original spellings, not how I'd write
them nowadays.)

brain: miathie, senekhakidh, maxyt
card: galta, zalaphivërar, galat
cave: iortren, walardia, yerenat, galat, jortry
human: iánnanid, vérisha, ---, nethlian, janyd, ineda
mix: kontoglý, shteshtanarg

>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?
I hadn't developed that kind of aesthetic judgment yet.

>5)  How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
>expressed in your native language?
I had lots of words for things like imaginary animals or the pieces of
fictional board games, but not for things that might apply to the real
world. I did distinguish between two different shades of blue as basic
color words, though.

>6)  How many of you used it for prayer?  For secrecy?
I did have a language, Iftinas, that was originally designed as a private
language. Iftinas had its own alphabet, with a cursive style for writing
and a print style for typing on the computer. I didn't even write down the
vocabulary, just memorized the meanings of the words. I did have an
inflection table for verbs and nouns, though. Iftinas was created around
1982 or 1983, which would put it around the end of my early conlanging
period. Fortunately, I managed to preserve some of the vocabulary while I
still remembered it.

>7)  For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
>
>8)  A language for a conculture?
Olaetian and Niskloz (my first two languages) were both fictional languages
with their own concultures, like most of my early languages.

>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'd say that a mystical language would be a class of philosophical
languages designed with spiritual purposes in mind. None of my languages
really fall into that category.

--
languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>---
hmiller (Herman Miller)   "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
@io.com  email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
\ "Subject: teamouse" /  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin