Re: The Melting

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Leigh" <thomas@...>


> Jesse:
> > > I'm not even this clear as to how the Yivrindi interact with
> our world. I know that they have a completely separate conworld,
> Aratasa, with its own history and origins, but I know that some
> of them have at various times crossed over into our world and
> inhabit our timeline. My informant,  Narnagol, is one of these.
> He's very vague about how he got here from Aratasa, though.
>
> Sally:
> > We share some problems in common, then! :)  My original Teonim
> inhabited a world and a time completely separate from this one,
> but over the years I have been more and more invested in
> bringing them into this world and hit upon the "melting" as a
> kind of fantasy/sf explanation.
>
> Yay, I'm not alone! I've been struggling with similar issues
> regarding the Rozhen, the people who speak Rozhendi.
That looks SO much like a Teonaht stative verb.  Rohhsendi: "be pink,
vulnerable."  Maybe you are feeling too vulnerable to your Rozhendi, and
have closed your ears to them.

>The
> language itself has frustrated me immensely, not to mention
> trying to figure out the people and how they interact with our
> world. I've been "working" on the language for over a decade
> now, and what do I have to show for it? Practically nothing. A
> few (less than 100) lexical items, and a few tidbits of grammar
> here and there, and that's all. It's quite odd; all of my other
> languages I was able to sit down and create. When I needed a
> word, I could just say, "all right, the word for X will be
> "blahblahblah", and that was it.
That's so familiar!  Much of my early Teonaht was pulling the words out of
the air.  It has become much harder now that I have so many words, and
possibilities for compounds and affixes.  Also, the word has to SOUND right
to me.  There has to be some kind of semantic cathexis.  That's why word
building over the years has been so difficult.  I've been more dogged at it,
though, than you; perhaps because you care so MUCH about these people you
won't hear them speaking.

> I had entire grammars all
> concisely laid out in tables and lists, needing only to fill out
> the dictionary.
I understand from years of listening to all of you, that "filling out the
dictionary" is one of the most painful aspects of conlanging.  Or the most
difficult.  Since we don't have the POLL NO 30 to remind us of the painful
aspects of conlanging, then I can only surmise.  But it seems that the fun
part is making up the structure.  Making up the thousands of words needed
for the language to "run" and memorizing them is the onerous part.  Is that
generally right?

> But Rozhendi's frustratingly different. It's like I'm
> discovering it rather than creating it.
Discovery, invention... invenio... I discover, I author.  Yes, I know
exactly what you're talking about.  And sometimes the door is open and
sometimes it's closed.

> I feel it much more
> deeply than any other conlang of mine, and oddly it's somehow
> more real despite there being so much less of it. I just have,
> and have had since the beginning, these vague feelings and ideas
> and notions about what the language and its speakers are like,
> and I just know sometimes what is or is not Rozhendi, regardless
> of what I'd like it to be, or what I'd like to be able to do
> with it. And on the occasions I have sat down and tried to
> sketch out a whole grammar or randomly generate vocabulary, it
> just hasn't worked.
You need a friend.  An ammanuensis.  A go-between.  You need to get into a
relaxed state of mind, pencil and pad and paper in hand, and let that
go-between dictate to you.  I've heard that this is how remote viewing works
best, if you believe in that sort of thing.  You need to view remotely your
Rozhendi people and hear their voices.  I've got a friend who writes that
way.  She opens a door, and the events and the people are there and talking
or they aren't.  She also has to be majorly distracted from her work at
hand, and doing it under duress.  If she's on holiday with oodles of time,
she can't do it.

> Often I've gotten *some* particular word or
> grammatical feature out of such sessions, but I've also thrown
> out countless notebooks and stuff that were full of stuff that
> just wasn't Rozhendi. I can't stand it, because this is the one
> language I want to have and be able to use more than any other,
> but at this rate I'll be lucky if I have enough grammar and
> vocab down to put two sentences together before I die! :)
We're all gonna die, and our languages will be incomplete!  I'm fighting
that, but I have to do major research for my promotion, plus finish a novel,
plus live my life and attend to my students.

> I do know the Rozhen are human, I'm sure of that. More
> enlightened or capable than we, perhaps, or able to tap more of
> that unused brain capacity,
Ooooooh, yeah.  Many of my Teonim have "strange powers" and have made an art
out of it.  Many of them, though, are hard-working, honest laborers.
Shoemakers, farmers, masons, carpenters, tailors, fishmongers, policepeople.

> but human nonetheless. But I find
> myself with conflicting ideas about them which are still somehow
> inexplicably all true, illogical as that may seem. For example,
> I have long envisioned them the way we often envision the
> ancient Greeks or Romans -- dressed in flowing robes and
> toga-like vestments, women with the one boob hanging out (all
> right, so that one's probably the result of 20-year-old
> horniness),
Ah ha ha ha !!!   I think there's a reason why we come to conlanging and
conworlding at the age of twelve.  Language awakening, sexual awakening, an
awakening to reason and politics and structures, and sexy peoples.  My major
change at age twelve, after two years of making baby Teonean for my heaven
cats, was to put the heaven cats in heaven and turn the Teonim into young
men I could fantasize about, all in tight-fitting very audacious clothing:
earrings in their ears, their long hair braided with silver and copper
thread.

> strolling through wide boulevards of columns and
> marble. Yet I also cannot shake the certain conviction that they
> are contemporary and of the modern world; they watch TV and send
> emails and chat on the phone.
Well, exactly!  Go look at my Teonaht city:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html.  The woman is slumbering on
a balcony above a metropolis that is both ancient and modern, its streets
too narrow for the car to be negotiating way below.  There is the Teonaht
that is emergent and here--kind of retro, where people of the city take
taxicabs, go to the open market, ride on elevated trains, drive fifties
style automobiles, ride bicycles, dine in restaurants, have their papers in
order when they arrive or leave through the four main "portals" to our
world, look up at the great winged cats that line the ramparts of the city
(that one scene in AI where the lion-statues "wept tears" gave me a chill, a
frisson of recognition!).

Then there is the Teonaht city of my childhood, full of round houses, green
copper roofs, minarets and bugled announcements of the four "hours" of the
day; flower sellers (flowers are sacred and nurseries abound), the
spectacular gardens of the rich, the grandiose temples of the gods, priests
in silver robes, the usual stuff of fantasy.  And of course fabulous
landscapes dominated by mountains, waterfalls, and high mountain lakes. :)

And then there are the earlier fusions: the medieval Teonim working in
monasteries in medieval Europe, sixteenth-century explorers sailing the
seas, eighteenth-century surgeons struggling against prejudice...

> There is something of a Rozhen
> diaspora,
Oh yes... same for the Teonim.

> I suppose, ethnic communities scattered across the
> world, but they also have (or had) an island homeland called
> Atheléa  -- yes, shades of the Atlantis myth though the phonetic
> similarity in the name is coincidental -- although I haven't
> been able to work out which ocean or sea it is in. I have
> thought at times that it might be deliberately hidden or
> protected by some sort of "magic" or technology which we do not
> possess or which was lost to us, with the result that most
> people (apart from them, of course, and certain select or
> fortunate others) cannot see it or find it and do not know that
> it even exists.
This is all very faerie.  Some of my Teonim communities have emerged in
Morris Dam, in the San Gabriel Foothills behind Glendora, where I grew up.
You ride there one day, on your bike, and you can see it.  The next day, and
you can't.

> An Atlantic location might explain the otherwise
> inexplicable presence of loanwords (unless the similarity in
> form and meaning is somehow always entirely coincidental) from
> various European languages, whose presence might make sense in
> the speech of diaspora communities,
That's what I'm banking on in the formation of the Teonaht language.  Ykwa,
for "horse," for instance.  But then, there has to be a more ancient word,
one they reserve for a horse god.

> but not in the language of a
> deliberately isolated island with an ancient literary tradition.
> At one point a number of years ago, a friend was helping me
> "create" Rozhen culture, and he designed a religion based on
> Wicca with one god and one goddess, but I was never able to make
> it fit in with my "vague certainties" about the culture. I
> haven't been able to work out what other religion(s) they might
> practice, though. Another inconsistency: the Rozhen are very
> warm and friendly people, who welcome and embrace as one of
> their own anyone who demonstrates an honest interest in their
> language, culture, and way of life. Over the centuries there
> have been occasional travellers from other parts of the world
> who stumbled across Atheléa and settled there; there's
> definitely ethnic mixing in the Rozhen heritage, no one "Rozhen
> type". And of course in the diaspora, Rozhen have intermarried
> and mixed with the local people wherever they went. So why,
> then, is their home country hidden and obscured from the world?
> What happened in their past that led to that?
Some betrayal.  The Teonim, on the other hand, are reserved and suspicious.
They are very warm amongst themselves, and while they crave visitors, and
need them, and sometimes kidnap them to augment their bloodline, they are
paradoxically overproud of their heritage, and often feel superior to us
Terrans.  On the other hand, though, they have irises that change color with
emotion.  They value this sign of their empathy and passion, but it's a
vulnerability, and a give-away.  They have very dramatic ways of expressing
affection and passion, but they try to keep their emotions hidden when
speaking with strangers.  They find us hard to read; they consider us
hypocritical.  Some of them have been trained to read our magnetic "auras,"
to look for small changes in the pupils.  They don't want to be at a
disadvantage.  The six fingers allow them to be masterful players of musical
instruments, but they are regarded as freakish by us.

> Alphabet is another thorny and irksome issue. There is an
> original Rozhendi alphabet, created by a friend at the very
> beginning, before I even had an inkling of what the culture was
> like, but it now just doesn't fit with the aesthetics of the
> language or the culture; yet even though it *looks* wrong, it is
> the writing system which *feels*most Rozhendi. But I still just
> can't see them writing like that, at least not all the time.
> They would find it ugly and not reflective of the beauty of
> their language, which is very important to them and needs to be
> expressed visually as well as aurally. I've tried using other
> invented alphabets, but again nothing really fits. I think using
> the Latin alphabet is increasingly common and trendy, especially
> among younger Rozhen,
spot on for the Teonim, of course...

> but there's no way older generations would
> use it, and certainly not in Atheléa. Maybe they use another
> writing system I've yet to work out, but then how the heck do I
> write anything in the meantime?
I've abandoned and picked up Teonaht many times.  Once I left it for almost
eight years.

> *Sigh*. I've written an emormous email now, and gotten myself
> all frustrated again just thinking about all my frustrations! :)
> Oh well, hopefully some of you will find it interesting, if
> overly verbose.
Not overly verbose.  Very interesting.  You need to follow instincts.  Good
to hear from you, Thomas.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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