Re: Conlangs: a window on the mind?

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
------------------------------------