Re: I'm new!

On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > Am I the only person who *didn't* start conlanging in earnest (as opposed
> > to the pathetic 6th grade semi-French-rune-English attempt that doesnt'
> > count) before the age of 20?  <pulling a face>
>
> Far from it.  I was always fascinated by languages and their details,
> nat, art, IAL, you name it, but I never tried to make up my own until
> really recently, and even then I didn't get past a phonology and an
> idea ("combine the good points of Chinese and Finnish").
My early experience with language was mixed.  I had a perfectly good
"exotic" language in the home but being pressured to learn it properly
turned me off (I'm afraid I was a contrary little kid).  Throughout
middle school I was learning French, scouring children's nonfiction books
on Ireland for Irish phrases (I can't remember why I was so enamored of
Irish), begging Russian phrases from friends, etc.  It was more a
magpie-collection than any sort of cohesive effort.  I only really became
aware of linguistics in high school when I found _The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language_ in the HS library.  That, Macaulay's _The
Social Art_ and ?'s _Mother Tongue_ were pretty much all they had.
(Well, they also had a fun Latin primer that I went through, trying to
pronounce everything, and I weirded out my parents over some winter break
that way.)

Conlanging "for real" began last summer when I rediscovered the Language
Construction Kit and all the wonderful websites out there, and finally
learned of this list.  :-)  I still have to redo the ancestor-tongue for
Chevraqis and re-derive all the morphemes, which would be more a pain
than it could be.  I *love* tri-consonantal morphology.  <song and
dance>  I am going to have to wean myself away from it someday, but until
then....

YHL, contemplating Meep (for which only scattered notes exist) and
Chevraqis (for which lots more scattered notes exist)