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!
<hesitantly> Vyko! Definitely haven't forgotten you, or Teonaht. :-)
> 1) How many of you old- and new-comers started inventing a language
> in isolation from the list?
I did...
> 1a) If so, how old were you?
Er...I was in 6th grade. That would've made me, um...12?
> 1b) Was it a project with friends or a solitary project?
Solitary.
> 1b) Did your invented language have some kind of private purpose?
> esoteric? erotic? religious or mystical?
It wasn't much of a language (essentially a quasi-French clone, since
that was the foreign language I was taking), but it was associated with a
private dreamworld that also wasn't much of a dreamworld and was largely
based on the goings-on in Diana Wynne Jones' _Fire and Hemlock_.
> 2) How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
> Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
Alas, no; I hit the Language Consruction Kit and that was what inspired
me, mostly to resume "for real."
> 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.
Pretty much, yeah.
> 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?
"Suggestive" is more important, though for certain concepts I also want
"beautiful" words (by my admittedly skewed standards).
> 5) How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
> expressed in your native language?
Yup. Either of them. :-)
> 6) How many of you used it for prayer? For secrecy?
Alas, I only used runic "writing" for secrecy. I did, however, invent a
conscript "cipher" for English for secrecy, but it wasn't a conlang.
> 7) For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
It is now. Back then, it was just, Neat!
> 8) A language for a conculture?
It is now....
> 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!
Wasn't this a previous question?
> 10) What is your definition of a mystical language? Would any of you
> characterize your conlang as such?
I'm not even sure what a mystical language would be, even allowing for
individual definitional variations. All my conlanging these days is for
conculture/writing/learning about linguistics purposes.
Good to hear from you again. :-)
Yoon Ha Lee, relatively pretty much a newcomer