> From: Sally Caves
>
> 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!
Welcome back Sally. I think you'll find things rather busy around here as
well. I seem to find the time to read maybe 10% of the posts and even less
time to respond.
> 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.
My conlanging not only predated this list, but being the old codger that I
am, predated the internet. I was about 13 or 14 years old (1956-57) when I
made my first feeble attempts at language cobbling. This was of course a
solitary project as my siblings thought it an odd way to spend my time and I
dared not reveal it to my contemporaries. Having always had a scientific
bent to my nature, I never engaged in any religious or mystical activities
(I had by then already proclaimed my atheism). Neither were my endeavors
either esoteric nor erotic. I had gotten interested in cryptography and
thought that a language of my own creation would make the perfect code.
> 2) How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
> Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
See response to 1)
> 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.
This is about all I did with my earliest attempts. I was too naive to
realize that language could be organized in ways other than the way English
was structured, so my endeavors were strictly lexical and my results
strictly English relexes.
> 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 immediately. My earliest word lists were somewhat eclectic
phonologically, but I soon began to find a phonological aesthetic that
unconsciously influenced my choices.
> 5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
This didn't occur to me until much later in my conlanging life.
> 6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
Secrecy. Indeed this was the original purpose.
> 7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
I suppose it always was an intellectual exercise (how could it not be?).
But I didn't consciously categorized as such until I was much older.
> 8) A language for a conculture?
Not until after I read Tolkien (sometime in the 1960's).
> 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!
Alas, I am no newcomer.
> 10) What is your definition of a mystical language? Would any of you
> characterize your conlang as such?
I have no idea what a mystical language might be and none of my attempts
ever addressed mysticism.
Glad to see you back Sally. The list has been drifting lately toward
auxlanginess so we need more artlanger influences.
David
David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
www.graywizard.net
Wisdom begins in wonder.