CHAT: Sitting by your fire (and a very brief de-lurk)

        For the benefit of the newbies, my name is Peter Clark, and for
several years I was a subscriber and occasional poster to this list (Dec
'96 - Mar '99). However, the amount of free time available to read the
volume on Conlang drastically fell, and so last year I reluctantly
unsubscribed, shortly before I moved to St. Petersburg,
Russia. (Zdrastvujte! i bol'shoj privet vsem pysskym i tem, kotorye
ponimajut, chto zhe govorju.)
        Ninth months passed, and all that time I (paraphrasing Dan
Sulani) longed to sit at your fire again. I wanted to bask in the glow of
your presence. :) I missed you guys! :~( So, back in January, I subscribed
again, and have been lurking ever since. Considering the amount of mail
that I need to cover ever single day (corresponding with my fiancee _does_
take a chunk of time out of the day), I have had no time to take part in
the discussions, but have thoroughly enjoyed my time here, evesdropping on
your conversations.
        Well, I still don't intend to de-lurk, but I suppose I might as
well say what my particular contributions to the Secret Vice are. My
personal language, Enamyn, has been under construction ever since the very
beginning. It was birthed as a philosophical language, much like Ro (this
was before I ever knew about Ro, or that other conlangs besides Esperanto
existed), but I quickly realized the impracticality of trying to force a
meaning to every sound. So in the past four years, Enamyn (which has also
gone by the name Nonami--"No-name" in ages when I had not yet decided on
name) has been undergoing radical, even violent, changes. Now, Enamyn's
stated goal is to be archane, baroque, and encrusted with centuries of
irregularities. About the only aspect of its grammar that has not changed
significantly is the noun tense. That is, the noun is inflected for
tense; the subject receives the actual tense marker, while any other nouns
in the sentance receive a relative marker, indicating whether they are in
the past, present, or future of the subject. Currently, I am working on
the orthography, which has slightly Hebraic flavor to it--so far I am very
pleased with the results. There will be a second, rarer script in the
style of the Classical Mongolian vertical script, but that can wait a
while.
        Another project of mine is Cleansed English, or English purged of
the Latin, Greek, and French interlopers. I am aware of another, similar
project (AEP, I believe), but unlike the AEP, I intend to stictly limit
myself to words still found in Modern English when inventing new
words. That doesn't mean that I don't stretch things a bit (well, I have
to, considering that 70% of the Modern English vocabulary has just
disappeared): "slave," for example, is "thrall," which you have probably
never heard before except in the word, "enthrall," which literally means
"to enslave." Alas, my dictionary that had the etymologies for all the
words listed was ruined when a hotel room I was staying in flooded. Let
this be a lesson to you: never take your conlang on vacation.
        A third project, which never really took off, was Espanglish. As
the name suggests, it was to be a pidgin of English and Spanish, although
more accurately, it should be described as English with Spanish leaking in
from the bottom. It was intended to go with a novel about a time, a
century hence, where the poor and disenfranchised speak English with many
poorly-pronounced Spanish words thrown in. Obviously, this would be
in the southwestern US. Alas, production of the novel ceased, consigning
the language to the dusty shelf upon which it currently sits.
        Have been thinking about inventing a spouse language. :) Something
I can specifically speak with my (soon-to-be, as of December) wife. Enamyn
will probably be far too complex for even its humble creator to speak with
a fair degree of fluency, but a simpler language, with simple
phonology and morphology, might be interesting. Assuming, of course, that
she is interested. Has anyone done this before? A language capable of
expressing, "Come over here and rescue me from this dreadful bore! If I
have to listen to him talk for another minute, I shall have to kill
him!" Such a language could be immensely useful. However, it would most
likely turn into a Russian/Japanese hybrid: she will teach me Japanese,
and I will teach her Russian, and since neither of us are native speakers
in either language, the results will be most interesting. ;>
        Well, I need to get my day started, but I just thought I would add
my two kopecks to discussion. We now return you to your regularly
scheduled message: "Re: CHAT: Has anyone written a poem in Hittite? was
Re: RE: Uses of the subjunctive in PIE, was: RE: USAGE: Trigger articles
in proto-Austronesian languages". Thank you, and have a nice day.
        :Peter