Re: Telek Webpage

On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Sally Caves wrote:

> Hi, Mark.  Your page says that you're at UCLA.
> I'm curious... did you and Matt Pearson find
> each other before you joined CONLANG?
No, I had never met Matt Pearson in person when I joined Conlang. He was
just a name on the list of students, as far as I was concerned. I made a
couple comments on-line about my work, and he surmised that I must be at
UCLA, so he contacted me.

  Matt's
> been here awhile, but you look new to me.
Been on Conlang since March.

  Have
> you been inventing languages before you heard
> about the list?
For years before I heard about the list. In fact, before I had even heard
about the internet. First conlang I remember doing was back about '87.

  It strikes me as remarkable to
> see two linguistics grad students at one university,
> both of them involved in conlanging.  What's the
> connection?  Or is it really just a coincidence?
Pretty much a coincidence. Although truth be told, a fair number of
professors in our department have conlanged at one time or another. The
late Vicky Fromkin did Land of the Lost and something else; Tim Stowell
had a candidate language for Alien Mime but wasn't chosen in the end. Tim
told me other profs did too, but he didn't give me any specifics.

> Or, as I have surmised in print,*** is this a far
> more common pastime than we used to assume?  <G>
Perhaps it is. I couldn't say. I've only met a couple conlangers in
person: Matt, my younger brother (also Matt), Vicky, and Tim. Oh, and a
pair of twins that my mother used to teach -- I'm not sure if you can
count that as a conlang, because it is something that they just
spontaneously did while learning to talk. (They're only six or seven right
now.)

Marcus