Re: Naive fluent speaker of one's conlang?

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 8:37 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
> Jim Henry, On 17/06/2008 23:39:
>>
>> I have been searching through my mail archives without success for an
>> anecdote someone told about a conlanger not active on this list (he
>> may be on ZBB); my best recollection is that he was described as a
>> naive fluent speaker of his conlang, i.e. he speaks it fluently but
>> can't explain how it works. I am not sure it was not Tony Harris
> I have, I think, referred betimes (but not since 2004) to Aluric, Teonaht
> and Namjuan as conlangs created intuitively through usage and only then, if
> at all, subjected to linguistic analysis, so that what explicit analysis
> there is describes the language but does not define it. I doubt this is what
> you're remembering, tho.
The same was true of Madjal and Kalusa; and at least with the latter,
some of us collaborators on Kalusa attained a certain degree of fluency
while we were working on it.  But what I was thinking of was definitely
someone with a personal conlang they'd become fluent in but couldn't
fully describe or analyze.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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