Re: Hallelujah! Let me introduce myself.

Beldilo! (A good day to you!)

Charlie Brickner wrote:
> My undying thanks to all who helped me overcome this obstacle.
>
> I am a 63-year-old Catholic priest and the pastor of 3 small parishes
> in the Blue Ridge Mtns. of VA.  I have had a love of languages &
> linguistics since I was a child.  I can remember checking out grammar
> books from the library as early as the fifth grade.  My first formal
> contact was with Latin in high school.  I was an R.N. before entering
> the seminary & "did time" in the army (Germany) and the Peace Corps
> (Honduras).  I now hold a B.A. in English, a B.A. in natural science,
> an M.A. in comparative religions, & TONS of theology credits.  I have
> credits in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French, Italian, & a minor
> in Spanish.  I can also read Portuguese.  My serious dabblings
> include Dutch, Japanese, Swahili, & Malay.
>
Now *that* is impressive! Of course, I'm probably only impressed because
you've had 3 times as long as I have to do all of that.

> More recently, say the last dozen years or so, I have become
> infatuated with Proto-Indo-European, the language & the culture.
> After reading Tolkien & so many others, I decided to have a go at my
> own conlang.  The foundation is Pokorny's Indogermanishes
> Woerterbuch, but adjustments are made to the grammar & the lexicon
> every time I receive an issue of "The Journal of Indoeuropean
> Studies."  It is definitely a work in progress.  I have placed the
> conlang in an historical setting, that of the steppes of Ukraine,
> Russia, and the Caucasus & Ural Mountains sometime during the last
> Ice Age.  Someday I hope to write a fantasy novel about all this.  Or
> maybe just continue to have fun with it.
>
I think just about everybody that reads Tolkien wants to be a conlanger.
PIE seems to have the same effect, especially the essay in the back of
the American Heritage Dictionary.

So is your conlang like a "Proto-PIE"? Or something like Nostratic? You
say it's set in the last Ice Age, which makes it (I think) older than
Proto-Afro-Asiatic. I would think that it would have some similarities
to the Caucasian languages, though, and whatever was really spoken in
the Urals. Sorry to ramble, I just think that protolanguages are one of
the most interesting parts of linguistics.

> My big problem now is that I am still a novice on the internet.  AND
> I'm still using WordPerfect 5.1!!  I will be needing a bit of help in
> the conlang group for a while.  Is there a site where I can learn
> those grammatical abbreviations that I see in the interlinear
> translations?  When a section of a message is repeated in a reply is
> it put there with cut & paste?
>
Everybody was a newbie once. :)

I still use Windows 98, and I even need to use a command line sometimes,
and there are a _lot_ of people that use WP 5.1.

Interlinears:
the Leipzig Glossing Rules
(http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html) are the closest thing
to a standard. That page has a list of abbreviations. If you need to
know what the actual terms mean, I don't know a good site for that.

Replying to messages:
Most mail programs copy the message you're replying to into your reply.
You're using Yahoo webmail, so it might do that. If it doesn't, then
just cut & paste. If it doesn't automatically quote (the ">" signs at
the beginning of each line) when you paste, switch to something else. :)

> I'm not sure how long these messages can be, so I'll introduce my
> conlang in another message.  Sure is good to be here.
>
I don't think there is a size limit on the list, but if a message is
*really* long, then at least put a warning in the subject. Some of the
members are on dialup connections, and they don't like spending 45
seconds downloading a message that they might not want to read. Remember
that there's a 5 message per day limit.

Like I said, I tend to ramble. I don't post much, and when I do...,
well, you see the result. I hope I answered some of your questions, and
didn't leave you with too many new ones. :)

> Charlie
--
Michael