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

Hi Sally, nice to hear from you again.

On Sat, 28 Apr 2001, Sally Caves wrote:

> Vyko, Conlangers!  I've taken a long long holiday (which
> essentially amounts to doing my dayjob at the university).
> I hope you haven't forgotten Teonaht!
>
> I'm speaking, again, at a conference in a few days, and I
> wanted to ask you a couple of questions--sort of along the
> lines of my old "Lunatic Survey."
>
> 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?
>         1b)  Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
>         1b)  Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
>                 esoteric?  erotic? religious or mystical?
>
>                 Since the topic of my panel is "the language of mysticism,"
>                 I'm especially interested in this last.
I started my senior year in high school. A friend was on board
at first, but when he realized I was serious about making up a
language, he bowed out. I don't recall exactly why I started it,
but I'm reasonably sure there was no religous or mystical intent
(though being a typical teenager at the time I thought up all of
the "dirty words" first; does that count as "erotic"? :-).

> 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.
Sounds about right; I had no idea of derivational morphology (or
indeed of the formal study of language other than my high school
German class).

> 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?
My first language was consciously modelled after Finnish. I had
a crush on the Finnish foreign exchange student, and I was
knee-deep in Tolkieniana. I recall the word for bird being
something like _tiri_; Tepa now has _tiwi_ [Ciwi] for bird.

> 5)  How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
>
> 6)  How many of you used it for prayer?  For secrecy?
>
> 7)  For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
My current project, Tepa, was begun as an exercise in non-
concatenative morphology, but quickly became much more; see my
answer to the next question.

> 8)  A language for a conculture?
Secondarily so. Tepa has become a way to explore the history of
the white settlement of southern Utah by framing the discovery
and documentation of Tepa as pseudo-historical account written
by a 19th century Mormon missionary to the Paiute and Ute
Indians of southern Utah.

> 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?
Tepa is definitely not a mystical language, though I'm sure
that there were Tepa mystics/shamans. I have no idea what Tepa
mysticism/shamanism was like, though.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir