Re: Skerre Play Online

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Long time members of Conlang may remember Doug Ball,
> creator of Skerre who's now a ling grad up at Stanford.  What
> you may not know (unless your name rhymes with Rally Raves)
> is the play written and performed in Skerre.
Cool stuff! I don't have anything nearly this cool, but one of these
days I ought to go through my old papers and try to find some of the old
translations I've done, mainly in Olaetian. I didn't have much of a
language in 8th grade, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to put on a
play in Olaetian. Besides, I wasn't much of a writer in the first place.
But I did some original writing, even back in the high school days, and
it might be amusing to take another look at it after all these years.

Unlike Skerre, Olaetian hasn't changed much since the early years, and I
can probably still read the early texts. It used to be one of the few
languages I could read and write without looking up every other word.
What happened is that I lost interest in the "human" cultures and
shifted focus to the "elvish" and other non-human people of what was
then still called the "Olaetian" universe, and later renamed to the more
neutral "Kolagian" (after the "Kolagian Library", i.e., "Universal
Library" on the planet Zel, so the name really meant "Universal
Universe" :-) )

So in a way the history of Skerre is quite the opposite of the
development of Olaetian, which started out as a human language (a
futuristic space-faring human language, but still definitely human) and
went into a long period of dormancy. For a while I had the idea that
Olaetians were part human and part elf. Now that there aren't any humans
in the Azirian universe, Olaetian is spoken by the next closest thing
(Yitha). While on the other hand the Skerre started out as more elf-like
and ended up "finally losing their alien-ness completely" according to
the page.