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Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Thursday, December 2, 1999, 4:06
"J. Barefoot" wrote:
> Does it ever > get you into trouble, i.e., do pedantic proofreaders ever give you grief > about perfectly grammatical sentences that run to five clauses or more?
Well, my mother will sometimes tease me about prescriptivist-type errors, but I rarely have a problem with run-on sentences.
> So I guess we should ask: Do you > consistently and spontaneously do quirky things with your native lang? Did > you do this before you were consciously a conlanger?
Well, I do have an unusual "idiocent" (idiocent:accent::idiolect:dialect). I suspect that part of it, at least the reason I haven't lost it, is an unconcious desire to have a unique pronunciation.
> It makes me think, perhaps > these languages are already fully formed, deep in the subconscious, waiting > for the intellect to discover them.
Hmm, well, I doubt that they're fully formed anywhere. My guess is that, altho you conciously forgot _yasan_, you unconciously remembered it, which is why you thought of the coining _yasi_. Or perhaps it was co-incidence, there being a third factor that made both _yasan_ and _yasi_ "sound right". -- "Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." - anonymous http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor