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Re: Ephphatha

From:Michael Potter <mhpotter@...>
Date:Tuesday, May 18, 2004, 22:10
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've never had a formal foreign language class in my life except for 2 years of Spanish in high school. I've never really studied Latin or German or anything else. Almost all the language (and linguistics) I know comes from online, except for a few books. But I've been fascinated with the possibilities for years. I remember seeing Arabic and Chinese on TV and wondering how anybody could read something like that. And I also remember my cousin teaching me the numbers 1-10 in Spanish when I was about 4. My first real exposure to another language was in 3rd grade (back in 1991). I was in the gifted class, and the teacher would give lessons in French once a week. Mostly vocabulary and pronunciation, not much grammar. I remember that I had the best "accent" of everyone in the class. The first time I realized the possibility of _creating_ a language was in high school (around '99). Some people on an Internet forum were talking about Esperanto. I didn't really get into the debate, but I did notice a link somebody posted: "Language Construction Kit". I read that, and the Verdurian pages, and I was hooked. -- Michael