Re: my conlang: anyone interested?

Hello!

> (helped along by Mark
> Rosenfelder, Pablo David Flores,
The Language Kits are a good help, aren't they? If there were no LCK, I
wouldn't have managed to get interested into conlanging at all. I found it
on the web last year and thought it would be a funny idea to try it out...

> *I meant "unusual 13-year-old who is a conlanger"! Misuse of modifiers; I
> know no other 13-> year-old conlangers (or even a conlanger in person!).
... and ...
> If you're only 13 and already know that the field of linguistics exists,
> you're way ahead of the game.  I didn't discover it until I was 16 or 17,
> but that still gave me enough lead time to do an undergrad major in it,
> which is more than most people manage.  (At my university, at least.)
I'd consider myself to be "usual", but I'm only 17. On the Zompist
Bulletin Board (www.spinnoff.com/zbb) we've got some 13-aged and many <20
aged. Many of them started at 13, 14, 15 years as well AFAIK. I didn't know
that there exists a field called "Linguistics" until I was 16. Understanding
most topics from this list is still hard sometimes, becaues I haven't learnt
that much about Linguistics yet.

> The problem is that in the old days before
> the internet, conlangers could not usually get in
> touch with each other, so each one tended to believe
> that s/he was the only one.
That's the advantage of our time. If there was no Conlang list or the ZBB,
I couldn't have asked anybody. I don't know anybody in real life who does
conlanging, too.

> The disappointing thing is that my university didn't offer any classed
> whatsoever in historical linguistics (even though it had a very good
> linguistics department), which has always been my main interest.  When the
> time comes to pick potential colleges, you may want to really scrutinize
> their linguistics departments to make certain that their areas of interest
> match well with yours, though, even if they don't, it will be a
> mind-broadening experience.
I don't know, perhaps because my mother studied Current English and French
for translating, I've always been somehow interested in words ... in primary
school, I could work better with letters as with numbers you see (this is
still oftentimes the case). And I always wanted to know where a word comes
from - my father always answered "So you've to buy yourself an
ethymologic dictionary!" because he could not answer my question as well,
except telling that the word is obviously taken from Latin or Greek if so. I
didn't even know what an "ethymologic dictionary" is ... today we've got one
in my parents' bookshelf, although only in German. If someone knows a good
online ethymologic dictionary (preferably an English one), could you please
mail me a link off-list? I'm still not sure if I should go to a university
and study if I'm ready with school in 2006 at all. If I'll study, I still
don't know what I could study. Linguistics?! Which professions do you need
Linguistics for? My mother works in an office of a company that produces
shrink-packing-machines (e.g. for wrapping a sixpack of Coke into plastic
film). She only works as translator for some christian publishing houses as
a second job. But in every case, "broadening" one's mind is never wrong,
that's true.

*) We live in Germany and German is because of that my family's native
language, although my father's mother's ancestors are from France and my
mother's mother's grand-grand-parents are from the Netherlands.

> Of course! The usual MO around here is to post a
> link to ones grammar. Sometimes tha has to "sell"
> your efforts a little by, for example, giving
> some teasers in the email. And even then, don't
> be surprised or dismayed if no one responds
> substantively. It's not that we're not
> interested, sometimes there's just no comment.
www.beckerscarsten.de/index.php?conlang=main will redirect you to my
conlangs' main page.
I gave up the first attempt, "The Nameless Language", because I didn't like
it and I don't feel like refining all the grammar and words and so on. I
like Daléian more, but I'm not good in making up words and so althogh there
are currently some 460 words in the dictionary, I think you can't say much
in Daléian :( My problem is I do not learn my conlangs by hard, that's why
cannot give examples that easily. I've got enough to do with learning
English and French! By the way, what is an "MO"?


Have fun with further conlanging and don't give up when people say, you'd be
crazy because you're doing this!

Carsten

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vvv  A big "teaser", isn't it?  vvv
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