Twisted Worldview Co[n]langs

David Peterson ha tera a:

> I thought of something a couple days ago, so I wanted to ask.   Has >
anyone created or heard of a conlang that was meant to represent a
> twisted worldview?  So, for example, a language that might be
> created by someone who thought that  everything bad that s/he did
> was someone else's fault.   Some words might be  as follows:
> ala, V., "to be caused/forced to make a mistake": I ala = "I was
> caused/forced to make a mistake (*I* certainly wasn't the one
> responsible)."
> menu, V., "to put oneself in a position that (the direct object) had
> no choice but to hurt such a one's feelings": You menu me = "You put
> yourself in such a position that I couldn't do anything but hurt
> your feelings--what did you expect?"
> You could think of any number of languages that take into account
> some sort of a mentality that's not, well, usual.   The trick would
> be changing what is a morphologically basic word vs. a
> morphologically complex verb. (...)
Well, I had an idea, which never got beyond the "that's neat, what if a
language did that" stage, which treated the speaker as the centre of
the universe, so that instead of walking towards something, you would
say that you walked it towards you -  the worldview being that your
motion of legs and feet etc. is moving the earth backwards under you,
while you stay in the same place.  I'm not sure how such a language
would deal with other people's motion - if you're the centre of the
universe, everyone else must be walking around - but when they speak,
they speak as if they're the centre of the universe, and you're walking
around.  Would there be different verbs for one's own motion and
others' motion? since they're obviously quite different in nature -
you're moving everything, while they're just moving themselves.

Estel

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