Re: SemiOT: Revealing your conlanger status, personal experiences of reaction...

In a message dated 6/17/04 10:33:50 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
scaves@FRONTIERNET.NET writes:

<< How lucky you are to have such a handle on your language!  I am still
 working on fluency in Teonaht.  I, too, however, have come across old texts
 I've written in T. and deciphered them, with difficulty; I'm always
 inventing and discarding words. >>
In all honesty, I think the main reason I can read and write "fluently" in
Rihana-ye is that it is (as yet) a much less sophisticated  language than
Teonaht, as may be noticed in the examples we have posted, from our respective
langs.  Although my official dictionary
has several thousand Rihana-ye words,  my internalized working vocabulary is
much smaller. I tend to write steadily in my limited vocabulary until I need a
word  or a
grammatical construction I do not know, either because it does not exist or
because I have invented it and forgotten it.  At that point I either simply
invent a new one and go on, or if I have time I check in my dictionary or my
grammatical introduction and see what I have invented before--if I have invented
something to cover it, I use that, if not,  I invent something, record it, and
go on. Because of the tendency to invent words when away from my dictionaries,
I know there are a fair number of words in my existing texts that are not yet
in my dictionaries. However, as I am going through the texts and transcribing
them onto my computer, I am trying to catch words (and other aspects of the
language)  which have not previously been recorded and record them. Since all
Rihana-ye words are created from the same limited set of roots , and most
Rihana-ye texts have interlinear translations, I can generally figure out the
meaning and derivation of any "lost" word or construction I come across while
transcribing.
John Leland