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

Sidde nioni.  Before I begin, what's the URL for the Bast relay?  I can't
find it from your homepage.

: 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!
Actually, I was just looking at your page the other day; it's got a lovely
script.

: 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?
About 13.

:         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?
Not at all.  I believe it may have started for the purpose of fleshing out
an RPG.

:                 Since the topic of my panel is "the language of
mysticism,"
:                 I'm especially interested in this last.
I'm working on one of those right now.  It's that one I was bringing up
shortly ago, with the exotic syllabic sibilants.  It's going to be a
fossilized magical language like Old Hyskos, so I've wrestled the lexicon
into a very small inventory of roots and particles.  Hopefully, it'll be
pretty hip once I'm finished with it.

: 2)  How many of you newcomers heard of the list first and thought--
: Wow! I think I'll try my hand at conlanging!
Not me):  But it sure did make me aware of a whole bunchload of things that
I would never have thought of by myself (I still don't understand this
focus-pivot idea, or trigger systems.)

: 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.
I still do a good deal of that, but there are also words that come from my
(limited) root inventory.

: 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 excessively, though at times I steal words that strike me as elegant,
like chweng for darkness, from J. Gregory Keyes in some book of his, that
became cuenn.ag (/tSuEnn`ag/; It's a bit hard to pronounce those two
different ns together).

: 5)  How many of you invented words to express concepts that could not be
: expressed in your native language?
I did a good deal of that.  Nrit has a whole system of colours that English
needs modifiers for.

: 6)  How many of you used it for prayer?  For secrecy?
Again, not me.

: 7)  For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
Me! Me!  Pick me!

: 8)  A language for a conculture?
Also me.

: 10)  What is your definition of a mystical language?  Would any of you
: characterize your conlang as such?
A language for the purpose of mysticism.  Thus, Nrit and Kîrri aren't
mystical, but Sstt is.

---
Shreyas

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