Re: ,Language' in language name?

In a message dated 11/27/01 10:08:43 AM, theiling@ABSINT.COM writes:

>Hi!
>
>How many people's conlang names contain the word for ,language' in
>that language?  I suspect that's around 100%, right? :-)
>
>Mine does, at least. :-)
>
>**Henrik
My langs aren't like that, AFAIK. Usually, when I start a language, the name
is one of the first things that comes to me, along with several interesting
or important features of it. So the names are there before any word for
"speech." The name Eloshtan happened to come from the name of an imaginary
country I had envisioned a while before, Eloshta. Then I had a language that
was unnamed for a while, and there came a point where the two seemed to fit
together. So, I named the language after the country. In the language itself,
the word is "losto" /lVStV/, and denotes the country, the language, or a
person - it's even more ambiguous than English (e.g. Germany, German, German
for the three listed above), which is rare. Intrafictionally, I believe it
comes from the name of the area where the people live, and Eloshtans prefer
to not name places or people after existing words, but to be creative and use
"nonsense" words, so the word really has no etymology.
Kar Marinam speakers live next to Eloshtans - they were in the area before
the Eloshtans moved in, and their language is unrelated. Since it is the only
tonal language around, they came to distinguish it from the speech of others
by calling it the "little song" - "màrin" is "song" and "käram" is a kind of
diminuitive adjective, used since it is a language after all, and not quite
as melodious as the average song.
As for my other language names, I'm not completely sure of their
intrafictional origins

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html