Re: What is it we are saying in our languages?

You raise difficult questions, Sally, at least for me. I've never felt that
Kash was particularly new or innovative from a linguistic point of view;
it's simply the language of a people very much like us who live on another
planet very much like ours. They don't look at all like us, but still, they
get up in the morning and take the bus to work. They like to party, and sit
around in sidewalk cafés. They behave, perhaps, a little better than we do,
but still manage to do dumb things and create problems for themselves.
Probably their most endearing feature is their lack of any concept of
Original Sin and the attendant guilt and quest for redemption; plus, their
planet has not had a war in 1000 years.

I've written exactly 3 little poems in the language, plus some translations,
not many. I'd like to write more, but oh, the inertia....It's hard enough
even to write creatively in English anymore, except for the occasional poem,
unpublished and all to often unfinished. I haven't written anything
resembling a "story" since college, when I did a lot, and the instructors,
at least, liked my work. Nowadays, I couldn't think up a plot if my life
depended on it. I like to blame the demise of whatever prose style I may
have had on the doctoral-thesis process and subsequent research orientation,
neither of which require or encourage grace, humor and ambiguity in one's
writing style. (Apologies for being so depressing.)