Re: some stewpid questions

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002 05:26:47 -0600, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>First, who here became a conlanger of sorts in childhood by making up words? (I
>used to annoy my piano teacher by referring to the treble clef as a "tref" --
>which is incidentally very similar to the word in Hebrew for a non-kosher food
>item.)
I did that to some extent. Mostly my made up words didn't refer to anything
in the real world, though: they were meaningless sounds and names, or
referred to imaginary animals and other things of that nature.

>Second, does anyone here have a fascination with reading/writing things
>backwards? I'm asking because I've come up with inspirations for words by just
>writing things backwards, in English or otherwise. Or I'd discover things like
>"think" being *kniht, and _cniht_ is "boy" in Old English isn't it?
I used some backwards words, mangled in various ways, for Sarbleski. I also
took English words and read them as if they were written in the Cyrillic
alphabet (reading "H" as /n/, for instance). Sarbleski wasn't a serious
language, but a number of its words ended up in Tirylhat.

One of my favorite backwards words is "vraps", which is from "sparv" (the
Swedish word for "sparrow"), but sounds as if it could be related to one of
the Slavic words for "sparrow". This is a rare example of a Ludireo word
that isn't directly borrowed from a natlang word.

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