On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 09:15:43PM -0400, Gabriel Brinton wrote:

> ¡Hola, idiomateros!

samápian kepteástoten tagéatyno!

> Who are you? 

Someone who has been conlanging since 1985, but not got nearly as much of
it done as many who started this century...  I'm now 44, with 2 kids who
like to claim they have their own "made-up languages" but are still, alas,
at the gibberish stage of conlanging.

> What are you working on? 

Nothing for the past year; I've been learning Lojban.  I also took several 
years off each for learning Russian and learning Japanese.  I still hope to 
someday study Mandarin, so there's more hiatuses in the future...

Conlangs I have worked on in the past include those listed at 
http://ewaorld.conlang.org :)

> What's your L1? Your L2, L3, etc? 

English, mostly-forgotten Russian, never-fully-competent Japanese, in that
order.

>  What do you want from a conlang? Naturalism or philosophical compatibility or usability?

Beauty and feeling, and a playing field on which to experiment with 
linguistic features.

> Do you have a language crush, whether nat or con? 

Athabaskan languages <3!  Also Tokana/Okuna.

> Who do you look up to? Tolkien or St. Hildegard von Bingen or someone more modern?

Heh, people on this list :)  And Ursula K. LeGuin (and her very under-
appreciated conlang from Always Coming Home), and the late lamented
Suzette Hadin Elgin, for her amazing perspectives and personal stories
that she shared in later years.

> Do you put your language in a fictional context? 

I barely do, and really wouldn't if it weren't for the subtle peer 
pressure of seeing everybody else do it...

> Are you down with nouns, or are you a verb nerb (alternatively, if you can't abide "nerb," and i wouldn't blame you, i'll accept "in lerb with verbs")? 

Um... I adore Athabaskan, Iroquois, Caucasian and Yeniseian languages.
I think it's safe to say I'd be happy if verbs entirely ate my grammar.

> Are you an armchair or faculty-office-chair linguist (whatever kind of chair _that_ is)? 

Armchair!  I am sometimes surprised to remember that I only ever took 
6 credit hours of undergraduate linguistics (and entirely Chomskyan, ugh).

> Have you just finished, oh idk, defending a Master's thesis? :D 

Oooh, I wish.  If I win a million dollars I get to go to school forever.

> Reference grammars or texts and translations? 

For reading or writing?  Translated texts for reading, texts and 
translations for writing, but I have a lot of reference grammars as if
I will someday get around to them.

> Sounds or structures? 

Structures, delicious structures!

> Grammar or lexicon?? 

Grammar!  I kind of got bored of studying Russian when they wanted me 
to start learning its literature instead of its syntax, and my lexicon
for my 30-year-old first conlang is still pretty pitiful.

> Coke or Pepsi?! (These are the hard-hitting questions.)

Absolutely tea or root beer.  Wintergreen is not any kind of mint, but
related to root beers, did you know?

> How did you get into this? 

Tolkien.  I wanted to emulate him entirely when I was 12.  When I got
The Book of Lost Tales for Christmas, and found out he started with
maps and languages and ended up with Lord of the Rings, I realized I 
needed a language (with sort of fake catalogs of words by Root, because 
Tolkien cataloged his words by Roots, exactly the nature of which I was 
vague on), and maps.

> How did you find this group? 

As someone surprisingly-much younger than me said, via 
alt.language.artificial, sometime around 1991 for me.

> And what drives you to continue making languages? 

It's apparent in my life that I can either be learning a language or making
one.  Suppressing either drive pops the other up.

> I really want to get a better sense of this community, who's here, and what you all do. This is a lot of questions, but i am unrepentent! >:D Answer as many or as few as you want, and i look forward to hearing from you.

This has been an inspired topic, and I love seeing people speak up who
have been silent too long.

tylakéhlpe'fo,
Amanda