Re: me and my languages

Traltan, Hmihkel hmeo Hpoxon!
(Greetings, Mr. Michael Poxon!)

We're delighted to have you.  How did you find out about CONLANG?
Yes, you've definitely got the right place.  

Love your page!  Eclectic indeed.  

I'm especially excited to have you on board--we're the same age, we've
both studied Celtic languages, and it looks as though we've both
been at the business of language inventing for decades.  I'm also 
into world building, drawing,  and fiction writing, and my "day job"
is spent teaching medieval literature at an American university.
I have a special interest in science fiction, too, so I liked your
astronomy pages.

You'll find a lot of soul brothers and sisters here.  Many of us are
linguists, and the information to be got on this list about linguistics
is of very high calibre--we're glad to have your voice added to it!
You'll find a wide variety of interests here: people interested in 
"concultures" (the nations and societies that go with the conlang),
experts in Malagasay, experts in the classical languages, and on.
One of our most creative projects has been our frequent "Conlang 
Relay Translation Games."  Irina Rempt, inventor of Valdyan, invented 
this "conlang telephone" game, where she called upon fifteen or
so people to pass an invented text around, which one translated
into one's own language and transmitted with grammatical instructions,
but no smooth translations, to the next person in line.  See her
"Starling Page" for that, and my "Bast Relay page," cited on my
website.   There have been a lot of imitators!

http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html

This page also lists some of the languages I've taken a shine to, but 
I'm trying to update the links, and add others.  You might also check 
out Richard Kennaway's Conlang links to see what fellow language 
cobblers have been up to:

http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html

My own Teonaht is about forty years old.  Unlike you, I nurture
one language only (I've dabbled with predecessors to Teonaht
and with dialects), but formal Teonaht and its slow, torturous
documentation has been my passion for the past decade.  I've
got most of the grammar up there, with plenty of pictures and
soundbytes, but it is a difficult and time-consuming process, and
proceeds in fits and starts.  It is the slow translation of scores of
brown, ruffled old pages into HTML.  My invention is of course what 
propelled me into studying languages and Middle Welsh in particular.  
Like you, I came to Tolkien relatively late, and was delighted and dismayed
that he had already had such a head start.  I thought I was the only
one doing this, and slightly manic and eccentric to be doing it, so
I kept it secret for a long time.  

Bvenmanrivar,  manttef bizrraf-jo
(welcome visitor, come and play!)

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/grammar.html
Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an
"The gods have retractible claws."  
                                The Gospel of Bastet

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Poxon 
  To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU 
  Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 7:26 AM
  Subject: me and my languages


  Dear All,

 First of all let me say I'm new to this newsgroups stuff, so I'm probably
sending this message to the wrong place. I want it to reach everyone, and hope
I've done the right thing! I'm sure to get it right eventually.
 A quick biog: I've been making up languages since childhood (I'm now 48) and
read (that's /red/ not /ri:d/ - linguistics at University, specialising in
Philology and Celtic (specifically Breton). After graduating, I continued my
studies and diversified into such fields as sound symbolism and lignuistic
universals. I also encountered Tolkien's languages at that point, having
deliberately avoided JRRT as everyone else wasn't and said how I must read it,
I'd love it, etc.,etc. Eventually, someone discovered I was keen on inventing
grammars and told me about Elvish. I was instantly struck by the similarity of
Sindarin to the Celtic tongues and that did it! I eventually became editor of
Quettar, the official Tolkien Society's linguistic magazine.
 My most highly-developed language doesn't actually have a name (for the moment
I'll call it omeina, the abstract noun meaning 'speech' from ome- to speak.
I've been at it, on and off, for about 20 years, but from the start it was
going to be an Ergative language. The phonology is fairly Indo-European and
mellifluous. I know for a fact there are two words which kicked off the
flavour. Like Tolkien, one is Finnish; the word is Alarieston. Only the
genitive form of the Surname Alariesto seen on a Christmas card, but I thought
it was the most beautiful word I'd ever heard! So in Omeina it means 'most
beautiful of all' (adjectives have many degrees of comparison, including the
hyperlative suffix -eston "...est of all" as in the leg-, -obb construction in
Hungarian). The other word was encountered in a linguistics book at University,
and I believe it was either Tokharian or Burushaski; Barduquinta (though spelt
in the actual instance Barduqinta). Bar- is the adjective meaning 'old,
long-enduring', and I know for a fact that it was inspired by the word Barhau
in the Welsh national anthem (mutated from the radical form Parhau, to endure).
 Omeina is exclusively suffixing, with no consonant clusters other than
homorganic glides (such as -ndr-, -nt- and so on). There is a very clear
influence from Basque not only in the Ergative grammar but also in the fondness
for initial voiced stops (though these are fairly rare elsewhere).
 I will soon be putting a grammar and vocabulary up on my website, but would
still like to hear from you-all. I am also available to help sort out general
grammatical, morphological and semantic queries!

  A viszonlatasra!
  Kenavo deoc'h!

  Michael Poxon



  "We put the thought of all that we love
   into all that we do"
                                (Tolkien)
  visit my website on:
  http://freespace.virgin.net/m.poxon/index.htm