Re: CHAT: Anglicisms

Chris Peters wrote:
>
>      Out of curiosity, how aware are any of you of any Anglicisms in your
> conlangs, whether in grammar, phonology, or otherwise?
Just checking through my old weathered grammars (some of these are
twenty-five years old!):

        derem, "act, do, manage" (from "do")
        plosa, "add" (from "plus")
        arpra, "arrow" (from "harp"--you propel it by a "string")
        evonnys, "black" (from "ebony")--changed to diron
        gorifya, "blood" (from "gore")--changed to gledh
        brote, "brother" (from you guessed it)--need to find new word
        hovik, "cabin, house," (from "hovel")
        froho, "cold," (from Spa. "frio")
        kompwy, "companion" (from same)
        tantairem, "dance" (from "tantrum")
        erthanys, "earth" (from same)--changed to takrem
        korbbys, "fat" (from "corpulent")--changed to something else
        wenrem, "fade" (from "wane")
        flehta, "flame" (from same), changed to _leht_; likewise:
        flethys, "fiery" (from "flame")--changed to _lehhdel_
        pronep, "fork" (from "prong")
        selloy, "full," (to rhyme with "cloying") ??
        damande, "hard"--to the touch (from both "adamant" and "demanding")
        mohsa, "large" (from "much")
        tenua, "muscle" (from "tendon")
        rohsy, "pink" (from "rose")
        flero, "red" (from "flare")--changed to myeebi
        coy (hcoy), "sentimental" (again from "cloy")
        nehsada, "shadow" (from same)--changed to _skodav_
        selebya, "silver" (from same)
        thyste, "sister" (from "sister" with a lisp)--need to change
        rimity, "test" (from "arithmetic")
        gejwa, "wealth" (from "gorgeous")
        hatrymonak, "marriage" (from "matrimony") !!  must change
        nody, "weird" (from "nerdy")
        serkuo, "wheel" (from "circle")-- changed to _hsyr_

A lot of these were created in my teen years; I was very unsophisticated
about language building, and paid no attention to roots and affixes, but
merely thought that I could add to my vocabulary as quickly as possible
by copying out words from--oh what was the name of that old red
dictionary
that some of you folks of my generation will remember from your
highschool
days; terribly bowdlerized-- copying out the English words into a
notebook
and "filling them in" by drawing them out of the air.  This quickly
became
an obsessional but fruitless task, never to be entirely finished, and
providing me with a spotty lexicon that made Teonaht etymology
completely
opaque to me.  In my twenties (when at graduate school) I endeavored to
"fix" a lot of these mistakes, and to start building a vocabulary from
roots, but it's really only in the last ten years that I've been able to
do that.  It's as though I was handed a mysterious language with words
I would never be able to trace, and asked to "finish" it.  Consequently,
T. is full of polysyllabic words that don't have a history. The list
above
is only the English inspirations.  I borrowed a lot, as you can imagine,
from Spanish and Latin and of course Welsh.  Then the onomatopoeic
inventions are another list entirely!

        yjrem (eezhrem) "scream"  (eeeeeeezh!)
        toyk, "sharp"
        bikrem, "chop" (bik, bik, bik)
        pilip, "drop" (of water, etc.)
        ngarik, "throat"  etc.

It's only in the last ten years that I've consciously abandoned the hunt
and peck trick of word invention, and have tried to concentrate on
building
vocabulary in T. that is true to its own structure, and maybe without an
English equivalent.  You might be interested to know that I abandoned it
almost entirely between 1983 and 1992.  There was NO development.  Which
is why all those adolescent characteristics still persist in it.

>      A few years ago, I managed to contact Marc Okrand with a few questions
> about his Klingon language.  For those who don't know, Mr. Okrand had quite
> extensive experience in several natlangs before he was hired to create
> Klingon.  (His field of study was comparative linguistics among and between
> Southeast Asian and Native North American languages.)  So he told me, if he
> created a Klingon rule that, by chance, was the same as a Burmese rule, then
> he consciously went _against_ Burmese for his next addition.  The result was
> one of the best developed "non-human" conlangs out there.  Sure makes me
> wish I had the time and money to get a PhD in the field, like he did!  :)
Maybe you will yet!
Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoeng.html