Re: Ephphatha

My story has interesting parallels with Joe's:

>For me, it wasn't Latin, but German that opened me up to the
>possibility.  The case system was thoroughly strange to me ...
Exactly so.  French lessons, as has been remarked elsewhere in
this thread, often lack grammatical rigour -- taking German at
age fourteen felt so much more grounded and comfortable.

>Then ... I went on a language binge.  I learnt little bits of
>every language I could find - Welsh, Latin, Sanskrit,
>Dutch, Norwegian, Turkish, etc.  I've only done three languages to any
>great extent, though  - French, German, and Spanish.
My language binge started at sixteen or so, probably triggered
by LotR, peaked two or three years later and gradually petered
out, though I still devour books of language sketches (Mithun
on American langs and the like).  I visited Russian, Spanish,
Japanese, Czech, Finnish, Hindi and classical Greek, but only
made serious inroads on Italian and Swedish in addition to my
school French and German. Having said that, I'm working on
Middle Egyptian at the moment, mainly because I find well-carved
hieroglyphs extremely beautiful (and because it would be
hilarious to put it on my CV ... I doubt I'll have the guts to do
that though :)

Conlanging for me started not with the Obligatory Euroclone but
with an OVS lang with postpositions, mainly a priori vocab but
borrowing from Russian and Quenya, voiceless nasals, some crunchy
clusters and an e with diaeresis of unclear function. :))  The impetus
to start conlanging was probably, again, Tolkien, although thinking
back I had invented a mini-lang for a school project the year before.
A few years later I made a start on a Romance language with Slavic
phonology, but it never reached more than three pages.  Interesting
to know how that would have turned out.  Then for the last six years
I've been a one-conlang man; although it's been a bit of a
philosopher's axe it's still very much the same language to me, and
the only one with any degree of sophistication.

Just my two cents, as they say. :)

Jonathan.

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