Re: Nineteen-year-old language sketch unearthed!

Amanda Babcock wrote:

> I exchanged languages with two of my friends, but
> we never really learned each other's to speak it!
We weren't really _speaking_ Thenian, so much as reciting from memory, much
as one might do parts of the Latin Mass.

> This reminds me, I wanted to mention one of my sketches that I really did
> do at 14 or 15 years old.  It was called "Ahlotarnom Intelokeyt", which
> meant "The Most Difficult Language".  Why was it so difficult, you ask?
> Why, because it had really quite a number - *several*, even - of
> declensions
> and conjugations!  And cases!  As many as 6 or 7!
About average, by today's conlang standards :-)))

My very first effort, at about that same age, consisted of exactly 1 verb--
bhar/anoi 'to bear', with about 10 pages of conjugated forms-- indicative,
subjunctive, imperative, desiderative, participles and probably more. I
don't recall any nouns :-(( That lang. too was based on ill-digested
encylopaedia articles (vintage 1900) on Sanskrit and "Indo-Germanic"
"philology", and wherever the cross refs. led.  The singular endings
were -mi, -si, -ti but after that it went off into a-priori-land for the
dual and plual :-))))

I actually had memorized most of the forms, and my first year in boarding
school would occasionally have friends test me...once that news got out, of
course, I was stamped forever as a certifiable loony. Even at my 50th
reunion a few years back, someone whom I barely recognized asked me if I
still invented languages.

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