Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

At 11:34 pm -0700 13/10/98, Matt Pearson wrote:
>> Amen. It may not be easy, it may take many many versions, but here at
>> conlang we are all blazing the trail of accelerated language evolution.
>
>Are we?  That's news to me.
And quite news to me also.  I thought we were hobbyists who delighted in
modelling languages.

[.....]
>natlang.  In fact, there are aspects of Tokana grammar, rules which need
>to be followed, that even *I* don't completely understand.  They just
>'feel' right for the language.
>
>I wonder if other people on this list have had that experience,
To which Christophe Grandsire replied:
>        It happens for me all the time! But I think that being surprised by
>my own creation is very important. It shows that it has its own 'life', so
>the creation has got the target I wanted to it.
And Diana Slattery also replied:
>
>--in a word, yes.  that most closely describes my experience.
To which I also say, yes, that is my experience too.

Tolkien talks in his books about "discovering" Quenya, Sindarin etc.  I
once thought this was just a literary conceit.  But now I'm sure he
actually meant it quite literally.

I think, maybe, that is why my unnamed briefscript has had such a long
gestation.  In my teens, as I've said, I churned out one IAL after another.
I didn't discover them - I invented them.  Quite the wrong approach IMO to
true conlanging.

Then a couple of years back as the result of discussions concerning Jeffrey
Henning's Montinoro, I hit upon the idea of a heavily Romanized nonIE
language surviving somewhere in the Balkans.  When I looked, I started
_discovering_ the language.  Yes, and one is never quite sure what one is
going to discover either!

Now, at long, long last I'm even beginning to gets glimpses of discoveries
with my older project.  Maybe soon I shall even discover its name  ;)

Ray.