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Re: NPR interview?

From:Sally Caves <scaves@...>
Date:Monday, July 5, 2004, 17:07
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, July 04, 2004 3:30 AM
Subject: NPR interview?


> Hey Sally,
Hi Tom! Nice to hear from you!
> Do you still have an audio file of the NPR interview you did > about conlanging three years ago? I went to their website > recently, and they appear no longer to have it in their > archives.
Yikes. I have the NPR tape somewhere; Brenda Tremblay gave it to me, and I could probably get it from her again if I can't locate it. I'm terrible about little audiotapes. It's probably downstairs by the stereo. I'm very good about CDs, CD-ROMs and Zipdisks. :) .
> (I'm sending this to the list because there are obviously > many who would also be interested in hearing it for the > first time.)
Well, it's interesting only because it's the first majorly broadcasted information about our list and our work. But I was very disappointed with it. I had been told that it would be fifteen minutes, but it got whittled down to four, and it is so reductive, takes what I said quite out of context, and gets some facts wrong. I spent 45 minutes with Brenda, who is a very nice lady, telling her the most interesting details about CONLANG and its participants, about Tolkien, about Teonaht, and commenting on the various philosophies of invention. I left the station thinking with a sinking heart that I should have reminded Brenda to give my affiliation--I don't know why I had a sense of foreboding since she asked me who I was and where I worked--and sure enough, after it was cut, I'm some "English professor" somewhere in the United States. :) She had asked me for the names of linguists at the University of Rochester that she could consult for the interview, and I had suggested the one who had co-taught an Independent Study with me to Doug Ball (remember Doug Ball? He was a student of mine who was briefly on the list, had invented Skerre, had turned it into a project for which he got college credit. He's now in graduate school at Stanford). But my colleague was reluctant to go on air. So she got another linguistics professor to "validate" my "hobby." (Prior to this event he had expressed mild amusement and condescension to me about conlanging, so I was a little aghast that she consulted him.) What amuses and annoys me slightly, is that I was considered the "subject" of curious scrutiny, and not an authority on the topic, presumably because I'm not in the linguistics department.. I like this man, but he knows squat about the invention of languages. Yet he's the one to get the title and the affiliation to the UR, and the authorization, and he basically compares conlanging to working the crossword puzzle or making a model boat. All of my discussion was reduced to the simplest terms possible: "She even added grammar!" "In graduate school, she started inventing unusual words like "tay" for "yes" and "vai" for "no." That was completely out of context! I told her about my earliest forays at invention when I was nine or ten, and she applies these words to my later developments of Teonaht! I had given her words like dazrydel, which means "in a state of magic," "enchanted": from tasry, "magic," plus -tel, "state of." I mentioned that it sounded like "bedazzled," but that's all that got recorded, as though I was pulling words out of the visionary mist. Basically, people don't know anything about language or its structure. Or the invention of language. The notion that I would add "grammar" to Teonaht instead of making it a simple relex of English is considered amazing. It's also considered, somehow, SEPARATE from language. So what makes the interview interesting, then, is its record of lay astonishment (and incomprehension) about not only private language invention but language in general. No CONCEPT of the intricacies we apply to it. To be fair, though, the recording of Tolkien singing "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" is really quite beautiful. And I got some compliments from several people around the nation who emailed me and said my reading sounded like a real language, or who confessed to doing this themselves. That was nice, but because I wasn't affiliated with any university, they had to guess where I was or remember my name. Brenda researched all this diligently, bless her, and it's a nicely put together four minute segment. But Descartes didn't invent a language: he wrote enthusiastically to a colleague about the importance of developing a philosophical or universal language. So she didn't get that from me! :) If you're determined to hear this you can go to the link on my faculty page: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/wesun/20010805.wesun.13.ram The link to the transcript of the interview is gone. If I can find the tape I'll write out a transcript, but the whole thing and the memory of it embarrasses me a bit, at the same time that I was happy that it aired in some form at least. Does anyone know how to convert .ra files or .rn files into .mp3 files or .wav files... or into any format that the new Windows Media Player can play? I can't even play my own Teonaht recordings anymore on this computer, or even on my old one. And WAV files are enormous. Would Roxio Easy CD Creator be up to the task? Sally scaves@frontiernet.net http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoreal2.html

Replies

Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
David Barrow <davidab@...>