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

On Sat, 28 Apr 2001 10:33:36 -0700, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
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."
My memory is not too good but I'll try to guess at some answers.

1) in isolation -- no list

1a) I don't remember when I started; I know I was inventing a language at
age 20 because I mentioned it to my roommate and he promptly invented his
own. I may have started as early as age 14.

1b) solitary

1c) no such purpose that I can recall.

2) not me. Coincidentally, I discovered this list while looking for
something else shortly after I started conlanging again a few years off.

3) I don't think I've ever done the word-list thing; I'm very bad at
vocabulary. But I believe that sort of thing is what my aforementioned
roommate did.

Exotic/Beautiful/Suggestive not generally important.

No, but at least one language was started with the intent of making certain
concepts less clumsily expressable.

6) for prayer or secrecy, no. At one point early on, I was going to invent
a language to speak with friends when we were in public places solely for
the purpose of making people wonder what language we were speaking. That
language was never even started, though.

7) Mostly intellectual exercise.

8) Not yet for a conculture, although a language will tend to have a
culture implicitly.

9) see answer 2. I'm not quite a newcomer -- I joined the list (as opposed
to joining the egroups list) right before your submersal.

10) It seems to me that mystical and language are largely incompatible, so
I the answer would have to be no.

Jeff

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