Speaking in tongues
Jul. 7th, 2007 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThis weekend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scotica and I are attending the 2nd annual Language Creation Conference which happens to be held on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Nothing quite like a small lecture hall packed with other folks who think inventing your own languages (and cultures to speak them) is a perfectly natural and understandable enthusiasm. It's been a nice mix of theoretical presentations and people showing off bits of their own creations, combined with some interactional games and workshops. (One of the workshops involved vocabulary-creation exercises using Duplo blocks to represent linguistic "building blocks" and my team really rocked.) It turns out one of the people running it was one one of my beginning linguistics students back several years ago. If I make it to another one of the conferences I'll probably submit something to present. (I dislike presenting the first time I attend a conference -- I'd rather get a feel for the event first.) Not sure when that might be -- next year's is in New York in April, which would be hard to manage that close to Kalamazoo, and the year after that they're talking about Europe.
I'm of two minds about sharing background information about my Kaltaoven language -- the one in the skin-singers stories in Sword and Sorceress. On the one hand, it would be fun to set out some of the underlying features of the language in public. But on the other hand, I like the idea of including just enough in the way of glosses and translations of the language snippets that I include in the stories that someone could do a fair amount of starting to work things out on their own. And it would also be fun to leave it as a puzzle for interested readers to try to solve on their own, if they like. But then, not everyone who enjoys languages wants to go to the trouble of decoding them on their own. And, of course, maybe nobody cares. I suppose at the very least I could set up a page on my web site that collects all the language data from the stories in a single convenient place.
Anyway, more conference tomorrow -- should be fun.
scotica and I are attending the 2nd annual Language Creation Conference which happens to be held on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Nothing quite like a small lecture hall packed with other folks who think inventing your own languages (and cultures to speak them) is a perfectly natural and understandable enthusiasm. It's been a nice mix of theoretical presentations and people showing off bits of their own creations, combined with some interactional games and workshops. (One of the workshops involved vocabulary-creation exercises using Duplo blocks to represent linguistic "building blocks" and my team really rocked.) It turns out one of the people running it was one one of my beginning linguistics students back several years ago. If I make it to another one of the conferences I'll probably submit something to present. (I dislike presenting the first time I attend a conference -- I'd rather get a feel for the event first.) Not sure when that might be -- next year's is in New York in April, which would be hard to manage that close to Kalamazoo, and the year after that they're talking about Europe.I'm of two minds about sharing background information about my Kaltaoven language -- the one in the skin-singers stories in Sword and Sorceress. On the one hand, it would be fun to set out some of the underlying features of the language in public. But on the other hand, I like the idea of including just enough in the way of glosses and translations of the language snippets that I include in the stories that someone could do a fair amount of starting to work things out on their own. And it would also be fun to leave it as a puzzle for interested readers to try to solve on their own, if they like. But then, not everyone who enjoys languages wants to go to the trouble of decoding them on their own. And, of course, maybe nobody cares. I suppose at the very least I could set up a page on my web site that collects all the language data from the stories in a single convenient place.
Anyway, more conference tomorrow -- should be fun.
