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Re: Occult languages

From:Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 25, 2001, 3:48
Hm.
Oddly enough, I have some ideas here.

I have a conlang that uses a special set of pronouns to refer to gods,
priests, and other religious personages.  One could expand that to genders,
as you've suggested, or do something more elaborate still.
One could have "attitude" rather than gender in nouns, where this attitude
isn't an inherent quality of the noun, but a reflection of the speaker's
feelings toward it.
Verbs could have special  moods for address of supernatural beings.
For that matter, there could be supernatural and natural vocative
formations.
Or sentence structure that changes depending on the addressor and
addressee - maybe people speak in VOS forms when using the first person in
conversation with a supernatural, but the subject is otherwise in front.
For a language that isn't speakable by normal humans, but would make an
interesting coding game, one could invent it a script and assign numerical
values to each of the letters (I'm going to pretend now this is a
Semitic-style consonantal script), and perform mathematical transformations
on the numerical values to find inflected forms.
Since this is a flaky occult conlang, it could have all sorts of bizarrre
features, like evidentials like "a vision told me so," "the spirit said",
etc.
It may be very rich in metaphor and symbolism that needs a great deal of
study to understand.
Etc.

---
Shreyas