Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, December 11, 1999, 19:00 |
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Gerald, isn't it something of a misnomer that dyslexia is a confusion
of right/left direction? I clearly know nothing about this, but I
thought that it meant, generally, problems with reading, which *could*
include directional confusions. At any rate, I think it's hazardous
to make armchair diagnoses of people in public, even with the best
intentions. Let the professionals take care of that, even though this
is a warm and fuzzy atmosphere where we trust each other enough to
disclose these kinds of things.
As for synaesthesia: I display it, too, with colors and personalities
for numbers (the personalities are on the order of the ones Matt
listed: one is a tall dark man, turned away; two is a nun supplicating
him, dressed in blue; three is a blonde-haired chubby woman railing at
four; four is a gentleman, listening politely and dressed in purple;
etc.
These personifications helped me with my multiplication tables.
I don't really think any of this is synaesthesia, though. Isn't this
just
the age-old creative process that allows us to turn abstractions into
human
form--a basic human impulse responsible early on for our old gods and
daemons)?
It strikes me that true synaesthesia is even more dramatic: experiencing
sounds from a musical instrument tactilely, or olfactorily, or as
brilliant
colors seen in the head? Some of you have confessed to that. I don't
have
anything quite like that, but I do make associations across sensory
input.
As for OCD: it runs in our family as well, but with different
manifestations
than are currently being described. We're mostly victims to hypomania
and
depression--very COMMON afflictions. I have read, inspired by the
maladies
of my family members and my own mild symptoms, a book called _The Boy
Who
Couldn't Stop Washing_. It included a case-history of a man who had
rituals
for very common words he encountered in print and which slowed his
reading down.
As for whether any of these creative and burdensome gifts are components
in conlanging, I simply don't know, but it's an interesting question.
Sally
**************************************
Gerald Koenig wrote:
> Hi, Nicole,
>
> My wife thinks its more likely that you may have a form of dyslexia
> than OCD, and the counting serves to order the words under distracting
> conditions. She adds numbers skilfully when not distracted, but starts
> transposing numbers when the phone rings. Dyslexia is of some concern to
> to me as the vector tense system depends on a clear right/left sense.
> I could easily write a variant which uses fore/aft or up/down for
> past/future, but I don't know if that would help. Can anyone who knows
> they are dyslexic comment? It is not essential visualize vector tense
> constructs to work them, but it helps as memory support. By the way,
> everyone I know who is dyslexic is very intelligent. I wonder if
> dyslexia is disproportionately represented on conlang also, giving
> another possible clue to our group identity. I'm coming around to And's
> view that it takes some very unusual verbal sensibilities to make a
> conlanger. I'm not sure about myself yet but I think it's my compulsive
> need for logic in all things that marks me, although I seem to have the
> music-image phenomonon to some degree. Probably a I'm a subclass of the
> Boars. I'd like to hear from the Mockingbirds and Hound Dogs as well.
> And I think conlang has its Accountants, and more.
>
> Jerry
>
> Honesty is such a lonely word---Billy Joel
>
> >Nicole
> >--
> >nicole.eap@snet.net
> >
http://nicole.conlang.org
> >