There are 2 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
2a. Re: Bowery Boys
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Messages
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1a. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Wed Sep 5, 2012 9:41 am ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Wednesday 05 September 2012 06:16:20 Herman Miller wrote:
> On 9/4/2012 2:34 PM, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 03, 2012 at 08:42:59PM -0400, Daniel Bowman wrote:
> >> So I did my first real work on Angosey when I was 12, but I didn't
> >> actually make it into a coherent language until I was 16. I translated
> >> the poem with "your eyes are like an ocean..." when I was 17.
> >
> > 12-going-on-13 is a magical age. That's also when I started my language,
> > and 13-going-on-14 is when I rehauled it to have the first inklings of
> > non-relexed-English grammar.
> >
> > tylakèhlpë'fö,
> > Amanda
>
> Coincidentally, 12 going on 13 is about what my age was when I saw Star
> Wars for the first time, which I've credited with giving me the idea for
> making languages. I suppose if it wasn't Star Wars, eventually I would
> have got the idea from reading Tolkien. But I don't have any actual
> notes dated from as early as 1977, and I'm not sure exactly when I
> started on Olaetian.
Like so many of us, I was 12 when two important events regarding
my conlanging career happened. I started learning Latin in
school, and was attracted by its rich and colourful inflectional
paradigms - what a contrast against the pallor of the paradigms
of German, where case is often only marked on the article and
subject pronouns are mandatory because the verb forms aren't
clear enough (let alone the almost complete absence of inflection
in English, which I had started learning two years earlier)!
This language was the main source of inspiration for my conlangs
for many years to come!
Also, I read _The Hobbit_ (in German translation), and _The Lord
of the Rings_ (also in German translation) shortly thereafter.
I also seem to remember that 12 was the age when I embarked on
my first conlang project. It was an auxlang(!), cannot remember
the name and therefore call this project "Homu" now, after its
word for 'human being'. All I remember (and probably pretty
much all that has ever been fixed) was that I'd use Latin word
roots and a gender system in which nouns denoting male beings
ended in -o, nouns denoting female beings ended in -a, and nouns
denoting beings of either sex or things to which no sex could
be ascribed ended in -u. This resulted in triads such as:
_homo_ 'human male'
_homa_ 'human female'
_homu_ 'human being of either sex'
Pretty much as in Novial (which I didn't know then), only that
Novial has -e for 'either sex, or none'. I used similar gender
systems in several later conlangs, including Old Albic.
I no longer have much material on the conlangs that I made up
in the following years, though I found some inflectional
paradigms of one language just yesterday.
Old Albic began in 2001, when I decided to discontinue the
Sindarin-based Nur-ellen language which I had started the year
before, and build something of my own.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (17)
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2a. Re: Bowery Boys
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Wed Sep 5, 2012 10:05 am ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Tuesday 04 September 2012 12:49:31 Daniel Prohaska wrote:
> <Landwirt> 'officialese' term for 'farmer', considered neutral, but without
> the somerimes derogatory connotation 'Bauer' may assume. The term is young
> and has to do with the increased economising of farming in the late 19th
> century. Today 'Landwirt' is more of a landowner of large, highly
> mechanised economically viable farming business, whereas a 'Bauer' has
> less land, fewer animals. Noble or ex-noble landowners will refer to
> themselves as 'Landwirt' rather than 'Bauer', a term more associated with
> a tenant farmer. 'Bauer' on the pejorative side is also used as a term for
> 'country bumpkin' or 'backwoodsman'. Dan
As a native speaker of German whose father also is a (now
retired) farmer, I can pretty much confirm this.
_Landwirt_ is more formal than _Bauer_, and free from the latter's
negative connotations (the English word _boor_ is a cognate of
_Bauer_ whose negative connotations have crowded out its original
meaning). Also, a _Landwirt_ may be a manager of a large,
industrial-scale agricultural enterprise with hundreds of hectares
of land, thousands of heads of livestock and dozens of employees,
while a _Bauer_ is the proprietor of a smaller, more traditional,
family farm. Indeed, there is the (rather positively connoted)
term _bäuerliche Landwirtschaft_ for family-scale agriculture
(widely considered a "kindler, gentler" way of farming even though
modern family farms are also pretty high-tech) as opposed to
_industrielle Landwirtschaft_.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (5)
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