Re: Coming out & finding-the-community stories?

On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 09:02:07PM -0700, Sai Emrys wrote:
> Tell us about:
> * how you 'came out' as a conlanger in any context (academic, social,
> parents, ...), their reactions to it, etc
On one occasion, my (former) roommate & I happened to be talking about
linguistics, and I mentioned that I learned a lot from some mailing list
where people actually invented their own languages. Much to my surprise,
he started saying something in some unknown language, which turns out to
be a "secret language" he and his brother invented in primary school.
(Sadly, it hasn't been developed since.) Which then opened the door to
talking about my conlangs, etc.. At one point, I asked whether he
thought it was strange that I conlang, and he replied that he was not
surprised, as it fitted with my overall personality. (After all, I *am*
a person with rather peculiar hobbies... such as collecting and solving
a large collection of rubik's-cube-like puzzles, inventing math systems
for fun, and trying to visualize 4D. He goes around telling people that
I "think in 4 dimensions", although I wouldn't quite make such a bold
claim!)


> * how you found out that others do this (i.e. all of us weirdos) &
> your reactions to that.
[...]

I was con-worlding and building Ferochromon, and it had become quite
clear that I did NOT want the unrealistic scenario of English-speaking
people living in such an utterly *different* universe. I had just taken
a course in Classical Greek as a prerequisite of my interest in Biblical
(Koine) Greek, and had been newly exposed to whole new linguistic
vistas, so I was starting, I guess one might say in retrospect, the
preliminary stages of a conlang. The symmetric case system of Ebisédian
had become a clear goal in my mind, and I was actually googling for some
grammatical terms (I believe it was some esoteric noun case) when I
stumbled across somebody's conlang page. That led to other interesting
conlangs as Sally Caves' Teonaht, and eventually, inevitably, to
CONLANG. My initial reaction was, "Hum, not another Klingon-wannabe
crowd." And then something like, "Hmm, that's pretty crazy, so there ARE
people who do this stuff." And eventually, "this is pretty neat! So I'm
not the only one who thinks about this stuff!" After some initial
hesitation, I decided to subscribe to CONLANG, and the rest was history,
as they say. At first I was just lurking, having decided that I didn't
want to join the crowd but could at least pick their brains for such
ideas I had as the nullar number by asking questions once in a while.
Once I got started, though, I got hooked, and here I am.


T

--
I'm still trying to find a pun for "punishment"...