Re: Ephphatha

Interesting choice of subject line.

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 12:31:00PM +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:

> What was the thing that first opened your mind to the exciting
> possibilities of language?
Who can say what came first?  I've recognized so many of my influences
in others' postings.  I remember being aware of Spanish due to Sesame
Street (and only due to Sesame Street - we lived in Pittsburgh), although
it's not the Spanish for "sing a song" that stuck in my head, but rather
the words for "open" and "closed".  However, I never found the Spanish
terribly interesting, but found a one-page French wordlist from a
children's magazine (ostensibly so that one could learn Miss Piggy's
favorite language - I'm seeing a Muppet connection here) fascinating
enough to clip and save for years.

I spent my childhood mostly inventing alphabets, or rather ciphers of
the Latin alphabet, not languages.  My best friend and I did invent
a four-word "language" as part of a session of make-believe, once.

I did hoard every bit of language I came across.  In sixth grade, our
school taught 1/3 of a year each of German, French, and Spanish, but
perhaps I prized most the 1 day of Greek that we got from a Greek-speaking
substitute teacher when the Spanish teacher was out!  By this point
I was also paging through dictionaries and encyclopedias in my free
time looking for random alphabet charts to copy down.  I had quite a
collection.  I almost pity today's child who can find them all on the
Internet and glut their curiosity at once :)

I had had a little Latin in a 5th grade gifted class, as well, but
I can't say I ever had the alleged "inevitable Euroclone", unless
you count the few tables of Latinate conjunctions and declensions
I typed into our brand new PC AT with DOS (ooh!) one day three years
later or so, after my other conlanging was well established.

Tolkien influenced the alphabets starting with the Lord of the Rings
in... 6th?... grade.  I was terribly disappointed to find out that
runes were not an a priori invention of his!  (The dictionary charts
I found of four or five different futharks were a nice consolation
prize, though.)  And the Tengwar chart in the Appendices started me
on years of futile attempts to fit English phonology into neat squares :)

It wasn't until I read the Silmarillion (a year later?) that I got the
language bug for good, copying down pages of the glossary in the back.
And when I was given the first volume of the Book of Lost Tales, which
seemed to me to be a veritable recipe for following in Tolkien's
footsteps, inventing one's own cosmology, language, and ultimately
mythology, I began faithfully to do so after his manner, despite not
quite understanding what it was that I was copying.

That was the beginning of merechi, though it was known at the time as
"Ea" (my word for "to be" and also for my world, stolen shamelessly
from Eru Illuvatar's command of creation).  It looked a lot like
German at first, since I'd chosen to study that over French and
Spanish for my 7th grade year, but it always had random influences
from scraps of other languages I knew of - like "no" for "of", taken
from Japanese, and only coincidentally also a postposition (happily,
I did not consider that too outre, although I did sadly give up the
opportunity to have a construct case because I thought it unrealistic).
Eventually influences from Russian and Latin changed the language.
Oh, and LeGuin's book Always Coming Home!  How could I forget that?
Her language provided a much more organic, spiritual feel for merechi.

This is getting too long.  Suffice it to say that once I got to
high school, the doors were wide open, and any sort of linguistic
article in a reference book or science magazine, plus all those
delicious Teach Yourself books (I worked as a page at the library,
which was well stocked), were fodder for one of the two main languages
or the innumerable sketches.  I do want to mention Shogun - I read
the book, rather than seeing the movie, but I learned "wakarimasu"
and "wakarimasen" (the two most frequent Japanese words in the book,
I think), though I didn't learn them in context and with correct
pronunciation for another decade :)

My obsessive characteristics were in full flower in adolescence.
I'm glad I could spend so much time and energy in the endless hunt
for alphabets, words, and phrases back then.  If I'd been able to
simply look up everything I wanted, I'd have tired of it quickly,
I think.  Maybe I'd have made up a philosophical classification
language instead :)

Amanda

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