Fluency in one's language, and the ROE

yl-ruil wrote:

 > For example, I liked a lot the *postpositional* articles with
*prefixed*
> > genetive marker.
Me too, great idea!

> Thank you, I happen to use Bulyth to write my diary in, I'm actually quite
> fluent.
Whooooaaaa!  My hat is off to you, yl-ruil.  What a wonderful
accomplishment.
How did you manage to arrive at this fluency?  I can write, with
difficulty,
in Teonaht, but not in the elegant way in which Teonaht is meant to be
written.
T. is convoluted, baroque, and needs practice, and its vocabulary keeps
expanding.
What I really need is somebody to talk TO in my language, but that,
sigh, is
asking too much.

Let's see: what would I say in a diary?  Today I did my taxes, and took
my
printer in to be repaired.  Well, the syntax is easily replicable.  But
I
have no word for "taxes," let alone "did my taxes."  And no word for
"printer."
Right there we have a block on fluency.  I suppose I could stick to
mundane
things:  fed my cat, washed the dishes, watched The Matrix...

You must have a sizeable amount of vocabulary invented and memorized,
yl-ruil.
Unless you are writing poetic things, and not referring to the daily
grind.
I could talk about love, in Teonaht.  And dream.  But I have a paucity
of
references to modern technology or to twentieth-century quotidian life.

******
Shall we invent an expression for the resistant outsider?  I just had
another
resistant outsider encounter (ROE) when I disclosed my Secret Vice...
which is
rapidly becoming not so secret.

ROE:  Why would you want to do that?
Me:  For the intellectual challenge, for the beauty.
ROE:  But you could do other things.  That people could understand.
Me:  There's a whole society of us who communicate about this.
ROE:  But why?  What's the point?
Me:  What's the point of making model railroads?
ROE:  But other people can see them.
Me:  That's true... a language is kind of invisible.  But it has aural
beauty.
ROE:  But it's meaningless unless somebody else understands what you're
saying.
Me:  Well, it's like making a system.  A logical system.  A system of
meanings.       Like making maps.  Like designing cities.
ROE:  I can understand a map.  But I can't understand this.  Does
anybody else
        speak your language with you?
Me:  No.
ROE:  Then I don't understand why you do it.
Me:  I wrote an article about it.
ROE:  You'd better show it to me!

(I think I might have a convert here!  Want to bet?  <G>

By the way, our own Douglas Ball will be giving a short lecture
at our University of Rochester Center for Undergraduate Research
Conference tomorrow on the topic of his invented language Skerre.
His topic was accepted by the conference organizers with enthusiasm,
and we'll see what questions and controversies they raise
tomorrow!  I get officially outed as his faculty sponsor, so that
will be interesting, too!  He's developing his language in an
official independent study co-directed by me and a professor in
the linguistics department, and I just thought I'd announce this.

Hope you don't mind, Doug!  We think you're great, and you're the
first to make glossopoeia an official topic of study at the UR.
Hurrah!!!!  Is the world ready for it?  <GGGGGGGGG>

Sally
============================================================
SALLY CAVES
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (T. homepage)
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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