CHAT: Fluent?!?!
Espero9
Tony Harris wrote about feeling like a "native" Aluric speaker.
I feel that way about Druni. I speak it, read it and think in it as well as it
can be done given that the vocabulary is still growing and I ocassionally come
across words I need and do not have.
I too keep a journal "Aspalferesh" in Druni. As I am writing a fiction story
(book) situated on the planet Drun it has become a large part of my thinking
world.
Sabutovin Drune Aluresi vey tamagit untaresea!
Greetings to Aluria and to other worlds!
Tsiasuk-Pron
(Jim H)
Nik Taylor
Espero9 wrote:
> Tony Harris wrote about feeling like a "native" Aluric speaker.
>
> I feel that way about Druni. I speak it, read it and think in it as well as it
> can be done given that the vocabulary is still growing and I ocassionally come
> across words I need and do not have.
This brings up an interesting point. How many other people have actually learned
their conlangs? I haven't, I'll admit that.
Cliff Crawford
On Fri, 16 Jan 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:
> This brings up an interesting point. How many other people have actually learned
> their conlangs? I haven't, I'll admit that.
Me neither. But then, none of mine have vocabularies of more than 50 or
so words at this point, so.....
--Cliff
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/cjc26/
Clinton Moreland-Stringham
On Fri, 16 Jan 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:
> > I feel that way about Druni. I speak it, read it and think in it as well as it
> > can be done given that the vocabulary is still growing and I ocassionally come
> > across words I need and do not have.
>
> This brings up an interesting point. How many other people have actually learned
> their conlangs? I haven't, I'll admit that.
I'm not quite as fluent as Nik is in Druni, but I am teaching it
to my clann. Printed out lesson two today! Soon, I'll have to post these
on the net....
Clinton
Nik
Clinton Moreland-Stringham wrote:
> I'm not quite as fluent as Nik is in Druni,
I'm not the one fluent in Druni, that was Espero9.
Amanda Babcock
On Sun, 11 Jan 1998, Tony Harris wrote:
> So out of curiousity, does anyone else feel that way about one of your
> conlangs? Like a native speaker, something that's a fundamental part
> of your person? Does anyone else use their conlang in the kinds of
> situations I described, i.e. note-taking, journal-writing, "talking to onesself",
> etc.?
Well, all the *cool* new conlangs I try to make, ergative or agglutinative
or whatever, I can never remember (or get very far with) them. But I can
still understand large parts of my high-school language. It is great for
writing prayers to imaginary gods, but I am almost ashamed to show it to
anyone because it has contradictory features from different layers of
evolution (standalone pronouns replaced by inflecting verbs, etc),
shameless relexes, duplicate vocabulary made up so new poetry would
scan... etc.
Not to mention spelling stuff however it looked good.
But just so everybody's happy, a sample:
delap'da miri, You leave again,
lop'a pedelam'da. I watch you go.
e dla, eleru, Goodbye, goodbye,
hro riba d'eso'fa, Why should we be thus,
hro riv esop'fa? Why always are we thus?
kimo peforam'fa, Forever we are parting,
latemi unge Like a tree
elaten p'assim'r, Losing its leaves,
kimo peforam. Forever parting.
(The poem is in dactylic-ish meter: !..!./!..!../!..!./!..!.. etc...)
In the detailed discussion below, a vowel followed by a / is stressed.
Actually, I liked diacritic marks almost as much as the inventor of
Aluric, and had 21 vowels, where stress and pronunciation differentiated
them. The diacritics marked a combination of stress and pronunciation.
One of the reasons for so many vowels was so I could use different vowels
for the same sounds if they'd look better. Every vowel occured in
stressed vs. unstressed forms, except an e that was pronounced /i/, which
was too rare for such distinctions. That leaves 20 vowels, 4 each for a,
e, o, and u, which differentiated stress and pronunciation, and 2 each for
i and y, which only differentiated stress -- even though the 2 y's were
sometimes pronounced /i/ and sometimes /ai/! (You just had to know
which.) The redundant ones -- long e and a both sounded like /e/, and i
and sometimes y both sounded like /i/. (So, counting both stressed and
unstressed, the phoneme /i/ could actually be written 5 ways.)
1. de/la -- v. to leave. Actually an old verb, invented before verb
conjugation changed (my dictionary has examples of the verb under the old
conjugation). de/lap: leaves, present tense. 'da: 2nd person sing.
ending, making de/lap'da "you leave". Apostrophes have no phonemic value,
they're just there to make endings look nifty.
2. mi/ri -- adv. again. Not sure if I invented it for the poem or already
had it.
3. lo -- v. to watch. lop is the present tense, 'a is the 1st person
sing. ending, making lop'a "I watch".
4. pede/lam is the imperfective of de/la. Actually, I think this
construction is limited to gerunds. This stuff was all invented before I
took linguistics, so I'm not sure what it encompasses... But pede/lam'da
doesn't mean "you are leaving", it means something along the lines of
"your act of leaving"...
5. e/ dla -- means "goodbye". Is not derived from other words. Is
supposed to look like an obscure mutation of a once-intelligible
construction.
6. ele/ru -- "goodbye" in my best friend's conlang.
7. hro -- adv. why. I had a comprehensive system of "wh-words", but for
some bizarre reason "why," "because," "for this reason" and "for that
reason" weren't among them. So I had to make this up for the poem.
8. ri/ba -- adv. thus. I had a word ea/lis "this way, this method" which
would have worked, but it's three syllables... so...
9. e/so -- v. to be, transitive. The intransitive verb for "to exist" is
e/a. e/so requires an object (loosly speaking). d'e/so is "should be",
'fa is the 1st person plural ending, making d'e/so'fa "we should be".
10. riv -- adv. always.
11. eso/p'fa -- eso/p present tense to be (transitive), 'fa 1st person
plural, eso/p'fa "we are". This is actually the correct stress pattern,
not e/so. The accents were explicitly written in the non-electronic form
of the language, and stress was *supposedly* lexically significant, but I
blithely moved stress around to accomodate poetic license all the time.
12. ki/mo -- adv. forever. I think I already had a word for "forever",
ci/li (pronounced with a hard 'k'), which has the same number of syllables
and the same stress pattern. Whichever came later, the reason for its
invention can only have been forgetfulness.
13. fo/ra -- v. to part. pefo/ram means "parting," so pefo/ram'fa should
mean "our parting", but then this stanza no verb. Apparently this time it
means "we are parting", and it looks like I was inconsistent with this
construction. I should have known better; I was studying Russian.
14. late/m -- n. tree. The stress shift on this one (forcing it to la/tem
for the poem) is inexcusable. This was one of my earliest, favorite, and
most frequently used words (yes, I *really* like trees <grin>), and I
would *never* pronounce it la/tem outside of this poem. Moreover, the
addition of the adverbial suffix -i practically forces penultimate stress!
Anyway, late/mi means treelike.
15. u/n -- pronoun 3rd person sing. (it). Pronounced with the short 'u'
from 'mud'. This is one of the old standalone pronouns. After the reform
they were only used to support suffixes, such as -ge, the possessive
suffix. So u/nge means "its".
16. e/lat -- n. leaf. Shares the root la/t, "green", with late/m, "tree".
e/laten is the old-style plural. This (as well as some other words in the
poem) should really have been accusative, but apparently use of the
accusative suffix -ic would have messed with the rhythm...
17. a/ss -- v. to lose. p'a/ssim means "losing," and illustrates how the
imperfective/gerund is formed for words beginning with vowels or ending in
consonants :) 'r is technically the 3rd person sing. suffix, female, but
I often used 'r as the suffix for all 3rd persons singular, regardless of
gender. So p'a/ssim'r in this case doesn't imply a female tree.
And yes, I pulled this 10-year-old poem from memory; I don't have a copy
on hand. Infusing a conlang with teenage angst makes it memorable.
Amanda
la...@quandary.org
Tony Harris
Amanda wrote:
>Well, all the *cool* new conlangs I try to make, ergative or =
agglutinative
>or whatever, I can never remember (or get very far with) them. But I =
can
>still understand large parts of my high-school language. It is great =
for
>writing prayers to imaginary gods, but I am almost ashamed to show it =
to
>anyone because it has contradictory features from different layers of
>evolution (standalone pronouns replaced by inflecting verbs, etc),
>shameless relexes, duplicate vocabulary made up so new poetry would
>scan... etc.
>Not to mention spelling stuff however it looked good.
>And yes, I pulled this 10-year-old poem from memory; I don't have a =
copy
>on hand. Infusing a conlang with teenage angst makes it memorable.
Actually, I don't think you should ever feel ashamed of your language, =
even
with contradictory features etc.
First off, it is after all *your* language. If it works for you and is
meaningful/useful/comfortable/whatever to you, then go with it. The =
goal
here is for us to have fun creating/using languages, not to hit some =
mythical
level of required proficiency at language creation.
More than that, though, if someone were to just look at English, French, =
or
Irish Gaelic, and analyze it from a linguistic point of view like we do =
for Conlangs,
I suspect any of the three would look irregular, silly, even foolish in =
their
case-usage for nouns, occasionally wierd plurals, irregularities, =
not-quite-case
system, etc. However, it is these very irregularities that add color to =
these
languages and make them feel more "real". And as for repeated =
vocabulary,
English is bubbling over with it!
I do understand the angst and the feeling of inadequacy (sp?) when =
presenting
your language to others. As I have shared on the list many times I went =
through
quite a period of shunning the whole concept of language creation as =
somehow
evil, and even since I still have vivid memories of teenage taunts as =
someone
found out that I was making my own language. But here in this safe =
haven for
us linguaphiles, we can show off our creations and be reassured.
End of Soapboxing, now back to your regularly scheduled listserv...
Tony Harris
Community College of Vermont
tony....@ccvtest.ccv.vsc.edu