Re: Experiences learning conlangs (was Re: Case system in Esperanto)
| From: | Jim Henry <jimhenry@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, June 4, 1999, 6:46 |
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On 1 Jun 99, at 19:22, Tom Wier wrote:
> This actually raises an interesting question: what kinds of experiences
> have people had with others trying to learn their languages,
> grammatically, phonologically or otherwise? Or, alternatively, what kinds
> have they experienced themselves in trying to learn another conlang (be it
> Esperanto or other less well known)?
I started learning Esperanto in 1996, about the time I started
conlanging actively again after a hiatus of some years. How it
happened was this. I was net-surfing one day & found Jeffrey
Henning's Model Languages page (indirectly) through a random
page link. Read his essays, then went back to a language I had
started working on some years earlier as part of one of mine & my
brother's world-building projects, & started redesigning and
expanding it. Same time, I was reading a couple of books on
linguistics from the college library and other conlang pages linked
to from Jeffrey's. Among those was Don Harlow's Esperanto page.
I had been studying French and classical Greek for awhile then,
but am now much more fluent in Esperanto than in either. It's a
cool language for thinking with.
While I was doing a lot of work in Thauliralau in late 1996, and
translated several texts into it, I got moderately fluent in it, in the
sense that toward the end I was able to write with infrequent
reference to my grammar & lexicon notes. But after I started
working on Llegisia and {gzb} I lost most of that.
I've been working on {gzb} for about a year now, and the last few
months I've mainly been focusing on learning the lexicon that I
made up earlier. There were some setbacks earlier on, as I
redesigned the phonology and consequently the lexicon after about
three months - there were too many consonant clusters in roots to
make many compounds pronouncable. At this point I know the
basic lexicon but to form sentences I have to go about it
deliberately and slowly. The grammar is simpler than Esperanto in
several respects (though admittedly far less flexible) but it's
dissimilar enough from English, Esperanto, and French that it
hasn't become unconscious habit yet.
>
> ===========================================
> Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
> AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
> <
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
> ===========================================
>