Re: CHAT: Synesthesia and conlanging (was Re: The ConlangInstinct)
| From: | Gerald Koenig <jlk@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, December 5, 1999, 2:07 |
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>From: Sally Caves'<scaves@...>'
>Subject: Re: CHAT: Synesthesia and conlanging (was Re: The ConlangInstinct)
>
>Grandsire, C.A. wrote:
>>
>> Nik Taylor wrote:
>> >
>> > "Grandsire, C.A." wrote:
>> > > (hence the fact that most monolingual people are
>> > > unable to imagine people thinking in another language than their own)
>
>Ha ha ha! Nik, did you write that? I can't sort out all the ">"s. I
>had
>the exact same fantasy, as a child. Once, when I was about fourteen, I
>made
>up a bunch of gobbledy gook that sounded, at least to me, like English.
>I
>wanted to imagine what English would sound like to a foreigner: lots of
>peculiar shlossing, arring, and umbling sounds. I still remember the
>first two
>sentences:
>
> VimMOW, tiver bemble! Aid chair nih brill voe diPOWN il jevels
> um TUNG gwaith. Tumb june plibe im prot milsy nih mobeth...
>
>I still even remember what it meant: "Hello, everybody, I'm here to
>tell
>you about the marvels of language. Some people find it very milsy to
>mobeth..."
>
>Pardon me, memory has broken down!!
>
>But then, to the hilarity of my family, I'd pronounce it in a western
>twang,
>a Brooklyn accent, a Charleston South Carolina Accent (copied from my
>grandmother), what I imagined was a French accent, a posh British
>accent...
>and it worked! The words were meaningless but the accents came through!
>And the tone.
Those are talents I've always admired, impersonation and doubletalk.
My mother could cop an accent or take a role in a minute, in fact it
was a problem because she always spoke like the changing society around
her, a sort of accelerated language drift.
I'm considering two new genres of conlangs, Mockingbirds and Boars (or
Bohrs). Bohrs only study theoretical matters, grammar etc. and aren't
allowed any wordplay. Mockingbirds have to adhere to role playing games
and fantasy cultures and may not hack traditional grammars. They also
reign over matters of phonology. Oh, I forgot the hound Dogs. They
never have to stop for breath and can string clauses together forever.
And of course any of these can be synesthetic. Sorry for those not
covered. The conlang T-shirt could be divided up into areas for each
type. Please don't give NGL a common border with any auxlangs. Well
obviously it calls for a peace conference between the factions as we'll
never agree on who is the True Conlanger.
>but fairly hard... comprehending a stream of it in a context unfamiliar
>to me (like having to listen to someone come and talk about computers
>fifteen years ago when I was in Geneva) feels like having water poured
>over me in the early stages of language learning. Or shooting arrows at
>me that fly through my body and never stick in my brain.
>
>Frankly, I have that problem sometimes when I'm listening to English
>spoken at learned conferences, where the discourse is Derridean or
>Lacanian
>critical theory. Word arrows flying through me, nothing sticking in my
>brain. <G>
I'm fitting all NGL vector arrow tips with nerf balls immediately,
they are guaranteed to stick. Please visit those lonely fellows by
putting this in the browser window:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/jl/jlk/writekit.nov
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Jerry | Without careful communication
Gerald Lea Koenig | jlkatnetcomdotcom There is boundless demonization.
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