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!
Certainly not!
>
> 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?
In my late 20s.
> 1b) Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
It was prompted by a fantasy role-playing game which I was refereeing at
the time, but the language creation was purely my project.
> 1b) Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
> esoteric? erotic? religious or mystical?
It was intended as local color for the game campaign.
>
> Since the topic of my panel is "the language of
> mysticism," I'm especially interested in this last.
I never really got to doing any secret or magical languages for the
game. The closest I came was to declare names for the various
mythological figures.
>
> 2) How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
> Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
Nope. Found the list after I'd started on my own.
>
> 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.
I started from the names. I wanted appropriate-sounding place names for
my campaign. So I started with the character names created by my
players, worked back to some word roots, worked forward to some place
names, back to some roots and so on until I realized I might as well do
a language.
>
> 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?
Not really. It was more important that the words be pronouncable by my
players, all native American English speakers with very little second
language experience.
>
> 5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
A few, with a secondary campaign language I started later. It was
intended to be the language of a non-human species, so I attempted to
reflect some of their psychology through their language.
>
> 6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
Nope, and nope.
>
> 7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
Absolutely. I put much more work into the language than was strictly
needed by the campaign, and in fact continued to work on it after that
campaign ended.
>
> 8) A language for a conculture?
Yup.
>
> 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?
Nope. It's possible that such exist in my conculture, but I haven't
explored the idea yet.
Laurie
milo@winternet.com
http://www.winternet.com/~milo
--
"Being bright does not grant an immunity to doing idiotic
things; more like, it just enlarges the possible scope."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold