Re: Ephphatha

Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:

>What was the thing that first opened your mind to the exciting
>possibilities of language? For me, it was studying Latin, which had a basic
>word order different from English, and also a great deal of freedom to vary
>that word order because of its inflecting morphology. It showed me, in a
>way that French never had, that it was possible for a language to work in a
>significantly different way from my own (I had been studying French at
>school for one year before I started Latin, and the course was more
>oriented towards basic communication than grammar). It was shortly after
>that that I created Lingu Scribem, my first attempt at a conlang (The
>Inevitable Euroclone).
>
>Pete
I remember when I was about 10 my grandparents were in Switzerland on
a mission, and in their letters they would occasionally put in some German
(Swiss variety, probably). I also remember liking to look at the encyclopedia
entry on alphabets and the cool scripts (Arabic & Russian mainly). In high
school I took German, since I had family who spoke it :). The other option
was Spanish and since I really did not like the way Spanish sounded (still
don't) German was the logical choice. Of course, when I was called to my
mission it was to a Spanish-speaking country, so my biases towards the
language had to get out of the way. I learned it competently (I was there
for 2 years), and can still make simple conversation after being home for
12 years. Since I don't like the language (I don't like English either, BTW
:) ) I haven't kept it up very much. I took 2 semesters of Russian in
college for the fun of it, but that is practically gone now too.

Tolkien and Esperanto got me interested in conlanging (Esperanto was
more of an influence) which I have done on and off now for 3-4 years.
My current project (kind of on hold until my Barlow Endowment commission
is finished...) is emindahken, a language spoken by a people on a distant
earth-like planet. I've been toying around with some ideas for a book for
several years and that is where this language idea came from.

That's probably enough rambling :).

James W.