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.

--Ph. D.