On 04/28/2001 at 10:33 AM Sally Caves gegrafet:
>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?
I started way before I'd ever even heard of the notion of an electronic
mailing list. :)
> 1a) If so, how old were you?
> 1b) Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
14 (IIRC)...alone.
> 1b) Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
> esoteric? erotic? religious or mystical?
My first conlangs were made in support of having consistent naming conventions
in an RPG world, having been inspired by similar consistency in _The Lord of the
Rings._
> Since the topic of my panel is "the language of mysticism,"
> I'm especially interested in this last.
>
>2) How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
>Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
N/A
>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.
I still do that sometimes. :) [A yet-unwebbed conlang, Taroan, has at least
one in its current (small) lexicon.]
>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.
>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?
Very important for beautiful and suggestive; less so (but not by too much)
for exotic.
>5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
>expressed in your native language?
Taroan has at least one word in its lexicon that covers a wide "field"
of meanings that I'm not aware of having been done in exactly that way
elsewhere (though that might just be my ignorance).
>6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
When I wanted secrecy I made new scripts (at least one of which I still
have lying around somewhere, I think) and wrote English in them.
>7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
>8) A language for a conculture?
Yes and yes. :)
>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!
N/A
>10) What is your definition of a mystical language? Would any of you
>characterize your conlang as such?
I'm not sure what a mystical language would be...if you mean one used
for specific purposes in religion, magic, the occult, etc., the answer would
be no.
Mathsyneir,
Cian Ross cian@io.com
http://www.io.com/~cian/conlang/
CCS !l cG:R:S:B: a++ y0 n4d:2d6 !R A-- E- L- N1
Isv k+ ia@ p m++ o P-- d? b? Veldaneas Lingwas