Re: Ephphatha

Hello,

Well, it seems I've always been interested in words actually. I remember
myself asking my dad where this-and-that word comes from and what it
means from time to time. Only German at that point, though - well, I was
only some 4 or 5 years old then.
Until I started *studying* a language, it took until I went to primary
school, where we learned the basic bits of German grammar. Learning
about German grammar went on until 8th or 9th grade or so. I didn't see
any sense in learning about my native language, so I disliked grammar.

I've been learning English from the 5th grade on, now I've nearly
finished 11th grade (only two months until the summer holidays :) ).
Learning languages has always been a pain, because of having to learn
grammar and vocabulary by hard. I didn't understand what it's good for
to learn English in 5th grade you see, and that it has big consequences.
Today I don't know what I'd do on the web without knowing English.
Because I thought it would be of no practical use to take Latin courses,
I took the other choice my school provided when I was in 8th grade,
which was French. I haven't acutally used my (bad) French until now, but
you never know. I still don't like learning grammar, but I know it's
necessary. Besides, I think another reason to be interested in language
is that my mother has studied contemporary English and French to work as
translator. My father also can speak English and French fluently and
still remembers some bits of Latin he learned in school during a
two-years course.

During my "childhood" I developed some ciphers of the Latin alphabet or
so, but I always threw the sheets away after some days. I could not
remember the letter shapes and there was absolutely no need for a
"secret alphabet". It were only doodleings anyway. Some time later I
became interested in the IPA, which I first saw in the encyclopedia of
my parents. I could even read the pronounciation help in my English
textbook, my classmates couldn't. They still cannot.

After having started reading LoTR in 8th grade, which took 1,5 years
actually because I switched a lot between English and German, I wanted
to know more about the Elven language, because it looked so beautiful. I
read through a Sindarin grammar and was disappointed about the only
vague knowledge one has about parts of it. Surfing the internet while
searching information on Sindarin and Quenya, I stumbled across Mark
Rosenfelder's "Language Construction Kit" and Pedro Pereira's "How to
create a language?" somehow and thought it might be fun inventing a
language. After a quater year of work I came up with The Nameless
Language, Ve Segelm A Laighöthét, which was kind of an advanced cypher
of German. Because I didn't like it anymore after some time, I started
Daléian. When I was finished with its grammar last year's autumn, in
December I began with Ayeri, whose grammar I'm still working on.

After having asked Mr. Rosenfelder some questions regarding his LCK, he
recommended me to the ZBB (Zompist Bulletin Board), where later, Markus
Miekk-oja aka Miekko (some people still may know him from this list)
recommended to beocome a subscriber of the Conlang Mailinglist to learn
more about linguistics and such. He said for my first tries I made good
conlangs and I should carry on and learn more about language. Seemingly
he saw a certain potential that sleeps inside of me. Well, and so I
subscribed on August 27, 2003, one day after my 17th birthday. I learned
quite a lot here and gathered a lot of interesting things to use in
conlangs. Getting material (i.e. books) about language isn't that easy,
though. I found out that our local library, which has about 37,000
books, has regarding linguistics only books on animal communication. And
getting books like "Morphosyntax" by Comrie - forget it. The only way to
get such books would be over Amazon. I still didn't dare to order that
book, although you see it recommended quite often by other conlangers.

As for the alphabets, I have more success now. I've managed to learn
Tengwar and can fluently read/write the Daléian alphabet which I made up
for Daléian. Nevertheless, I still don't remember a single Ayeri letter,
because they're too complicated - they're thought to be modelled on
Javanese and thus the letters look too similar. I also know the Greek
letters and the the major part of the Cyrillic ones, too.

--Carsten