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

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 y=
ou
> who have answered at length but not divulged, it would help me to know:
>
>                  11) what your conlang is called,
Mine has a perhaps overly pretensious name, "Degaspregos", which derivesf=
rom the PIE roots
*dhghem- ("earth") and *spreg- (naturally, "speak"), although
in reality it may be read as "language of the people of the earth", as th=
e
Proto-Indo-Europeans were far more in touch with nature as a general
rule.

>                  12) what are its unique features, and
Well, this is a tough one, because, unlike so many other (highly interest=
ing)ones here,
mine was not designed with any real intent to have "unique"
features per se.  In fact, it has been commented that it holds very much
to the hypothesized rules of UG (universal grammar), and so doesn't have
much that is too "unusual" to speak of, from a very wide, very general
linguistics of the world point of view.

Here are things that set it way apart from English though:

(a) it's agglutinative to the extent that it tends on polysyntheticism,
where whole strings of words in English would conflate into one word
(though with many morphemes). As an example:
Erossema kamerotoi apopleukekstibabit
An eagle could have been about to be flying into the sky [heavens]

(b) it has a middle voice (in the classical grammarian sense), but not
just limited to a very few verbs as in Greek, but general through the
whole language.

(c) Makes distinctions between near and far tense:

Einebeprit.  He was [just] about to go.
Einebersit.  He was going to go [sometime or another].

(though note that my dialect of English makes a distinction between
near and far in the past prospective:  "he was about to walk out the door=
"
(i.e., he was on the verge of crossing the door within a few short second=
s)
versus "he was going to walk out the door" (i.e., relative to some very i=
mmediate
time, he was further from actually leaving, perhaps only a few minutes lo=
nger
in this case)

(d) there are nine noun classes, the use of which is largely dependent
on what aspect of the noun in question the user wishes to highlight.

(e) verbs regularly indicate transitivity with a particular suffix -kw-
(from PIE *kwer- "cause, make").

(f) there are optional evidentiality markers to indicate how the speaker
knows what he does: for probable things, things apparent from indirect
evidence, things directly seen or heard, and things reported to the speak=
er
(though that's all he knows about it; this is often used in conjunction w=
ith
the experiential mode to indicate indirect discourse).

(g) there are a few interesting clitics and stuff of interest:

-kwe   "inclusive" and:  of the type "boys 'n' girls", where a close
            relationship is postulated, or for making groups.
e         "exclusive" and; just the opposite:
-ne       question suffix, directly cognate with Latin (stolen, really);
            feature that it particularizes the thing to which it is attac=
hed as the
            thing in question:  "Do you LOVE me?" vs. "Do YOU love me." v=
s
            "Do you love ME?".
-re        inherency clitic;  X is that way inherently so (like the hand =
attached
            to my body)
-pe       noninherency clitic;  X is not inherent (like a picture of a ha=
nd on the
            wall, or a model or something like that)

There are a few other for which I am still trying to find plausible cogna=
tes
(or even constructible cognates) in the protolanguage, like inclusive and
exclusive "or", but I think those function words may not be reconstructab=
le
from the protolanguage. As you can see, much of this project is research.

>                  13) whether you have a website.
> Come on!  Just hit that return button!  A lot of this I know already, a=
nd
> can check on in Kennaway, but it would be a convenience.
My main site is (as always) in the sig at the bottom of most of myemails =
here.
Specifically my Degaspregos site is located at:

<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/degaspregos.html>

>                  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 notabl=
y
> silent!)  Is one of the appeals of a private invented language that you
> alone know its secrets and control its development?
Well, not really either way.  I wouldn't mind it if people out there star=
tedlearning my
language, but (as I have said I think more than one in this
forum) that was not my goal in making the language.  My language had
two or three main emphases:

(1) to help me in the philological investigation of PIE and its daughter
languages more fully;
(2) to investigate the ways in which the human mind reacts to language
in general, and why it does that;
(3) Just for fun, because 'round 'bout the tenth grade I got bored of
learning Esperanto, and thought it might be fun to start out on my own.

(Of course, the early stages of Degaspregos were heavily affected by my
knowledge of Esperanto and German; for a long period, it only had four
cases, like German and Volap=FCk, and even had an -n accusative! But
that was more because of the -n-ish accusatives in German and Greek
that I knew. Just this evening I was adding some books to this catalog
listing I'm making of my books [which can be seen online BTW], and I
found a book mark in a copy of Steinbeck's _Of Mice and Men_, the
words written on which not only had phonemically long vowels, but no
real phonotactics to speak of, very different from the present language
where all vowels are simple and phonotactics are a major part of the
phonology -- which just shows what an education in linguistics can do to =
your
view of languages!)

>         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?
This is something that I have oft contemplated, and I am not sure exactly=
what would
happen.  A couple people (perhaps three or four) have contacted
me via email and told me they really like my pages, and would like to
(a) help me in the project or (b) learn the language. I was more or less =
stunned
and very flattered that anyone would want to learn it, but I am not entir=
ely
satisfied with it right now (besides the vocab, which pretty much by defi=
nition
cannot be satisfied, period).

I guess my answer would be this:  if people began using it and changing i=
t
because of natural linguistic functions, because they feel they would lik=
e to use
it and expand it (whatever that might mean to them), I would not mind so
much, but I would certainly like to take part in it, or at least get some=
 royalties
on the book sales. :)   But otherwise, no, if they were just changing it =
like the
Idistoj (i.e., the adherents of Ido) out there, just because they felt li=
ke changing
it. Since governments "should not be changed for light and transient
causes", this government (i.e., the grammar) should remain as long as it =
retains
its usages. That is, in hopes of sounding noncontradictory, they should h=
ave a
really good reason to change it. I dunno, really, because if it gets to t=
hat
point, I won't have much control over the situation anyways.

> Tehwo tsema brondi laz obil hea nomai pendo
> "Summer like a white sword hangs over the land."
I've been meaning to tell you, Sally, that I find this to be a beautiful
sentence, and I'm only talking about the phonetics of it;  when you
include the metaphor, it only adds to the brilliance. It has a rich flowi=
ng
sound to it, which I like, and would like to think that I have incorporat=
ed
into my own language (sigh, perhaps not...).  Long live the sword of
Damocles! :)  'Tis a good story for us all to remember.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

We look at [the Tao], and do not see it;
  Its name is the Invisible.
                 - Lao Tsu, _Tao Te Ching_

Nature is wont to hide herself.
                 - Herakleitos
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