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Re: Conlangs: a window on the mind?

From:Matt Pearson <mpearson@...>
Date:Sunday, October 4, 1998, 22:43
Skrintha wrote:

>In an early (unwittingly) relex project of mine, the con-word "ensser" >kept popping up in my mind as a suitable word to mean 'between' for no >reason apparent to me then. Only much later did it strike me that I had >subconsciously taken French "entre", given it the US-like -re->-er >end-flip and included the Modern High German feature of having an -ss- >instead of English/Scandinavian intervocalic -t-. It did give me the >feeling of taking a peek into my own subconscious mind! > >Have others detected such Freudian/Jungian patterns in their >conlanging?
Tokana contains a handful of words which were unwittingly borrowed from various natlangs, as others have pointed out - for instance "san" = "blood", from French "sang", and "aun" = "if", from archaic English "an". There are some more subtle permutations as well, such as "halma" = "book", probably related to the Quenya word "parma". However, none of these words have an etymology quite as interesting as "ensser"... Matt. ------------------------------------ Matt Pearson mpearson@ucla.edu UCLA Linguistics Department 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 ------------------------------------