Re: This is not a conlang.

As a postscript for what I wrote about an hour ago, let me tell a funny
little anecdote.  I was at the Medieval Institute Conference at Kalamazoo,
giving a paper on the Tenga and on glossolalia, and afterwards I went and
sat out in the lobby with the panel respondent and a scholar of medieval
magic  (I'm not sure he'd want his name on line).  He started me playing
some nonsense games and musical glossolalia.  He loves this kind of thing.
In fact, that panel discussion uncovered a number of conlangers, one of them
being our very own beloved John Leland.  At any rate, he would start a
musical refrain that he'd repeat and I was to sing over it.  All nonsense
words.  We got something going that sounded vaguely African.  People were
staring at us.  Then he said, let's have a conversation, and we'd "talk" to
each other, making demands, asking questions, challenging and refuting each
other, all in complete jibberish.  We were in stitches, and we'd gathered a
bit of a crowd.  As we were doing this, I switched into Teonaht, and he
abruptly stopped me.  That was your invented language, wasn't it? he said.
He could tell immediately.  I asked him how he knew.  "There was something
to the structure of it that sounded more than nonsense."  So I guess the
spontaneous invention of nonsense language has something lacking in it that
a "real" language, even invented, fulfills.  Probably Teonaht's phonology
and consonant clusters.

What an experience!  I'm at a loss to find anyone in my own university
community who is as lingually playful and as uninhibited as this guy.  I
miss this kind of thing, and my sisters are on the west coast.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>

> But really, my sisters and I would run around the back yard producing
> foreign languages on the spot.  The trick for me now is to produce not
> only
> words but phrases that repeat, that have a consistent sound to them (I can
> switch into nasal languages, sublaminal, whatever), and that show some
> sense
> of compounding, so that you're not just saying Eva kava lava maviba emby
> mahava lava taky maky rehaba laky saka.  Rather: esi em avbam em hoda,
> hodi
> anhodi em avbamas. Hodas esi em eletmas em bakmas, esi em besotmas.  Em
> hoda, esi em avbam em hoda.   Now that's harder to do on the spot!  So if
> you really want to fool someone, you have to start thinking in terms of
> phrases and repeated function words, and then you're halfway towards
> conlanging.  That's what really got me started, exposure to Spanish when I
> was nine or ten, being the clincher.
>
> I wish I had an MP3 recorder that worked.
>
> Sally