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

> 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!
>
Haetu, Sale! De dheve te!

> 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?
>
My first attempts were in 1976, following my move to
secondary school and my first few lessons in French.

>         1a)  If so, how old were you?
12, though the first serious attempts didn't start until a couple of
years later.

>         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?
>
The conlanging went hand in hand with map-making, new worlds circling
new suns.

>                 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!
>
Nope, though finding the list last year has been of massive help in
firming up my amateur attempts into a proper, working artlang.

> 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.
>
The wordsounds always seemed to come first, though far more went to
name places and towns in my maps ("derandidillio", "chanchuam",
"filegeda", "tallassimo", "tilukrhistu", "mosikolbala", etc) than
ended up in my language.

I would invent words as and when I needed them - most of the language
development was by the drafting of "teach yourself books", and as the
lessons progressed new words would be coined for the actions and
labels in that lessons. And then the grammar would collapse and it was
back to stage 1...

> 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?
>
The words had to sound "right". Nowadays, I generate reams of possible
words electronically, then pick out sounds appropriate to words as and
when I need them - so much easier than inventing new combinations
myself...

> 5)  How many of you invented words to express concepts that could
not be
> expressed in your native language?
>
Apart from words invented to carry out grammatical functions not
needed in English? Gevey has quite a few words for various "alien"
fauna and flora, as the conculture and conbiology accompanying the
language is also fairly well developed.

> 6)  How many of you used it for prayer?  For secrecy?
>
Nope.

> 7)  For how many of you was it an intellectual exercise?
>
It has become an intellectual exercise, and it has taught me more
about English grammar than I ever learned in school.

> 8)  A language for a conculture?
>
Definitely. Gevey is the trading language used extensively across the
eastern plains and mountains of the continent of Ewlah, on the planet
Kalieda. (I'm going to have to come up with a "proper" reason why the
place names don't tally with the language spelling conventions).

> 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!
>
Nope. See 2 above.

> 10)  What is your definition of a mystical language?  Would any of
you
> characterize your conlang as such?
>
Gevey has a "mystical side" built into its grammatical fabric - all
objects must posess a flavour of "status": inanimate, animate simple,
animate internal and animate external. The animate internal status is
often used by native speakers to render the spiritual, mystical
aspects of an object. Thus:

   yookuu - stone
   yuuka - the mystical qualities of stone

   rhabuu - wood, timber
   rhabe - tree
   rhaba - dryad, also the emotional impact of a tree on the observer.

Status is central to the language. Indeed adjectives must harmonise
with their objects by status and number, and verbs will agree with
their subjects in terms of status and number.

If this is of any interest (and you have time), I've tried to explain
the phenomenon of status on one of my webpages, at

http://homepages.enterprise.net/rikroots/gevey/nounstat.html - the
status of Gevey objects.

>
> Yry poy poy firrimby, talk to you soon!
> Sally Caves
Best wishes. Haetahzu!

Rik

--
http://homepages.enterprise.net/rikroots/gevey/index.html
The Gevey Language Resource.