Re: Ephphatha

>
> Date:    Mon, 17 May 2004 20:04:24 -0400
> From:    "Ph. D." <phild@...>
> Subject: Re: Ephphatha
>
> 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).
>
> When I was fourteen, I was looking through an old book
> of Latin quotations. I knew nothing about Latin, but I was
> intrigued by some of the recurring words. I had a sudden
> epiphany to create a language. I had heard that someone
> had created a language called Interlingua to replace all
> languages (so I had heard), but I knew nothing about it.
>
> So with a classmate, I obtained an old Latin dictionary,
> and we proceeded to create a relex of English. I had
> intended to use postpositions, just to be different, but
> early on we decided against that, because it was just
> too unrealistic!
>
> We had been studying Spanish, the only language
> offered at the small, rural school we attended. When
> the teacher found out that we were creating a language
> and were interested in Latin, she gave us each an old
> Latin textbook. Wow! They inflected nouns! We couldn't
> have imagined how different from English a language
> could be! So we threw out our first conlang and replaced
> it with a simplified Latin.
>
> And the rest is history. I'm currently working on Uteg,
> a VOS language with a vocabulary drawn from Irish
> and certain grammatical features from Malagasy.
I started conlanging a few months after taking my first lessons in Latin and
German at school, some 6-7 years ago, when I was still 14 years old. I had
already taken some Latin at home with mum, and I already knew about Latin
inflections. What really left me flabbergasted was the fact that even German
had a nominative-accusative distinction. Italian makes no formal distinction
between subject and object noun phrases (we have different sets for subject
and object personal pronouns, though, as English does), and for some
unfathomable reason I had started thinking only Romans and Greeks with their
allegedly fairly peaceful way of life had the time to care about such a
subtle distinction!!! I mean, I could understand inflections to mark
syntactic roles covered in Italian by prepositional structures, but the
accusative... it had to be something only ancient languages could have!
German simply upset me. I still remember asking a German girl who still
lives here to translate "I'm eating an apple" just to see if she really
translated "an apple" with "einen Apfel";-)))

Every time I think about it I realise how silly I was...;-)

Luca