Re: your conlang, please? (Rich Aunt gets hold of the Lunatic Survey)

Okay, I gave some of this in my first survey response, but what the
heck.

Sally Caves wrote:
>
> ...and how would you characterize it in fifty words more or less?
> You've been overwhelming me with wonderful revelations.  For those of you
> who have answered at length but not divulged, it would help me to know:
>
>                  11) what your conlang is called,
Its code name is "Old Southern". That is, code name like what a
reconstructionist linguist would use before determining what the people
themselves called the language. It will acquire a proper name when I
come up with one.

I have a handful of other conlangs in the bare sketch stage. They, too
have only code names. But they are all intended to exist in the same
fictional world. These include "Modern Arvandran" (a daughter language
of Old Southern), "Lizard Tongue" (used by an ancient, non-human
species) and "Desert Tongue" (not a daughter to Old Southern, but it is
currently spoken in lands neighboring on Arvandra).

>
>                  12) what are its unique features, and
I like the verb constructions. A conjugated verb takes three suffixes.
Tense morphemes refer to time relative to now. Scope morphemes refer to
periods of time, such as eternal, momentary or cyclic. A verb takes two
tense morphemes, one for the speaker and one for the event being spoken
of. The third verb suffix is the scope suffix.

The pronouns also show some interest. In third person pronouns I have
masculine, feminine, animate indeterminate, inanimate. Here is the note
regarding third person indeterminate, from my web page:

"The third person indeterminate gender is used when the gender of the
entity spoken of is not known, or not relevant to the topic. It is
appropriate to use for people as well as for animals, although it would
be unusual to use it if a known person is being referred to. For some
sentient races, such as the Dragons, it is considered rude to *not* use
this pronoun. For a group of entities, the third person indeterminate
plural is used, even if the group is known to be composed entiely of
males or entirely of females."

>
>                  13) whether you have a website.
Easy. This is my home page, and my conlangs are easy to find from there.

http://www.winternet.com/~milo/

>
> Come on!  Just hit that return button!  A lot of this I know already, and
> can check on in Kennaway, but it would be a convenience.
>
>                  14) Also: Mikhail Bakhtin wrote (in _Problems of
> Dostoevsky's Poetics_):
>
>         The life of the word is contained in its transfer from
>         one mouth to another, from one context to another context,
>         from one social collective to another, from one generation
>         to another generation.
>
> Of course this is precisely what we CAN'T say about "private languages."
> Does that bother you that your language has a speaker of one?  Some of
> you get together and learn each other's languages.  I'm thinking in
> particular of Brithenig and Kernu (whose inventors have remained notably
> silent!)  Is one of the appeals of a private invented language that you
> alone know its secrets and control its development?
>
>         What would happen if someone got hold of your conlang and
>         vast numbers began using it and speaking it and changing it?
>         Remember the "No Rich Aunt" scenario?  What if she made you
>         a village?
>
My conlang isn't developed enough yet to "go out on its own". It needs a
number of syntactic/semantic constructions yet. For example, I've just
been working on embedded clauses, but they aren't typed in for my web
page yet. There is a *ton* of basic vocabulary which hasn't been created
yet.

After that, if people started learning it and using it and the language
evolved *on its own* as languages do, I'd think it would be pretty cool.
Of course, I'd want to be able to study that as it happens. But in terms
of *conscious*, designed language change, I consider it a copyrighted
work, and anyone who wanted to do such better get permission from me.

And as someone else cited, this is intended to be a language of a
fictional people in a fictional world. So in that sense, it did enjoy
thousands of speakers while it was still a living language.

Laurie
---
milo@winternet.com
http://www.winternet.com/~milo