Re: CHAT: Conlang dreams revisited

The Gray Wizard's sig:

>‘Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!’
>A memorable remark! …Just consider the splendour of the words!   ‘I shall
>express the accusative case.’  Magnificent!  Not ‘it is expressed’ nor even
>the more shambling ‘it is sometimes expressed’, nor the grim ‘you must learn
>how it is expressed’.  What a pondering of alternatives within one’s choice
>before the final decision in favour of the daring and unusual prefix, so
>personal, so attractive; the final solution of some element in a design that
>had hitherto proved refractory.  Here were no base considerations of the
>‘practical’, the easiest for the ‘modern mind’, or for the million – only a
>question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal pleasure, a private sense of
>fitness.”
>
>(from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays - A Secret Vice,
>by J.R.R. Tolkien [Houghton Mifflin Company 1984])
Completely off-topic, but I think "the daring and unusual prefix" is
such a wonderfully delicious expression!  I've always admired
Tolkien's plotting more than his prose style, but every now and then he
came up with a real gem!  Describing a lowly prefix as "daring and unusual"
seems to me to sum up all the pleasures of conlanging in a single phrase.

Matt.