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
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