Re: Language and "mysticism," whatever that is.
| From: | Sylvia Sotomayor <kelen@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, April 28, 2001, 18:46 |
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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 at approx age 14. Since that was 20 years ago, my
recollections are fuzzy. But, it was my project alone, though some of
my friends knew about it. The language never had a purpose, but was
built around fairy-tale and fantasy motifs, and being that I was 14,
this included concepts a 14 year old would find mystical and exotic.
However, since the language has changed so much since then...
> 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.
Oh yes. I'd often find interesting sounding syllables in the oddest
places and then juxtapose them and turn them into names, which then
had to mean something, so they also became words. I found myself
staring at a Periodic Table of the Elements the other day, and the
memory of one of those incidents came back to me. I took the chemical
symbols Ge-As-Se which occur right next to each other and turned them
into the name 'Geathe', which 20 years later, still exists as
'Kithje'. Same character, more or less, too...
> 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?
It had to sound 'right'. What right is, i still don't really know.
> 5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
20 years ago, I was completely floored by the idea that there were
several different concepts that could be translated into 'love'.
[Such as Greek eros, philos, agape, etc...] I remember playing around
with those, but none of those words have survived. Nowadays, I would
say that this is certainly a fun part of making up vocabulary, but it
is not as important or necessary as it used to be.
> 6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
> 7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
I'd have to say it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything
else, and an adjunct to building a fairy-tale fantasy world to escpe
into.
> 8) A language for a conculture?
That too. Though that came later. Sort of.
OK. First there were characters, and they had to have names, and then
they had to have a language, and then, well, they had to live
somewhere...
> 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?
>
>
> Yry poy poy firrimby, talk to you soon!
> Sally Caves
> ==========================================================
> scaves@frontiernet.net
>
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/whatsteo.html
>
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonath.html
>
http://english.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.html
>
> Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
> "The gods have retractible claws."
> from _The Gospel of Bastet_
> ============================================================
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