Re: For Sally: Ursula LeGuin's conlang Kesh

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 11:50:23PM -0400, Sally Caves wrote:

> Thanks, Amanda!  How nice of Ursula Le Guin to write you this!  She is
> something!  Did I tell you I met her at Rochester almost sixteen years ago?
Wow, that's when this letter was written!  March 5 1987.

> We had a lovely discussion about what boots you had to wear in this
> gawdawful weather.  Any praise of her writing and she'd become instantly
> glassy-eyed.  Most celebrities want to forget, in chit chat, that they're
> revered celebrities.  So hard for admirers to remember that!
It's the natural (im)balance of power that occurs when one party knows
more about the other.

> I wonder if the lack of a "complete" grammar indicates that she made up just
> enough to fulfill her purposes for the novel, which was I guess my original
> obnoxious question! <G>.  Mea culpa!
Heh :)  Well, I can't answer that.  But she did make up as much as many
folks on here do, so it becomes a question of whether her motive was pure -
and then you have to ask, if somebody makes up a conlang for a role-playing
game (but actually does include some grammar, I don't mean just names)
does that count?  If you make it up for TV?  For use as an IAL? ;)

For what it's worth, I'm in awe of your creation - if there are conlang
"levels", you're on the top, as far as fleshed-out goes.

> But then, Teonaht doesn't have a
> "complete" posted grammar, either.  Or a "complete" posted lexicon.
That's what I understood her to mean, that it wasn't all written up.

> I wonder to what extent we are conlangers first and novelists second, or
> novelists first and conlangers second.   I wonder if my conlanging is a
> sublimation of my ignored need to write and publish novels.  Sigh.
An interesting question, for those to whom it applies.  I'm not a novelist.
Conlanging is more a compulsive act of organization for me.

> I like her sense of a distinction between you of my House, and you not of my
> House.
She definitely created the language as a part of her created culture, and
wanted it to reflect that.

> Gedadin seems to stand in for "a certain one is going."  I'm curious
> to know how it differs from "unspecified."
I interpreted it differently, as an animate but epicene pronoun like
Finnish's "hän".  The distinction between the first two is probably meant
to be inanimate versus animate.  It's a bit odd that there are then
gendered pronouns as well; I'd have gone for one or the other.

> Ailly, hemykkranya hterme rybbadon. :-(
tölíö tëtércip'da? ka'símöp'a :(
("What did you write?  I don't understand.")

Amanda

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