Summer, Language, Nerdy

I was going to post more this year but I just keep forgetting to!

Well, another summer is almost gone, and sadly this is the last summer that will mean anything. That is, of course, assuming I never decide to teach. If I do teach, summers will be awesome again.

As is the case with most summers, this one did not last long enough! They almost never do, you know. But in spite of it being short, it's been busy! In the midst of watching BO (that is, Barack Obama) try to trick the American people into a flagrantly socialistic form of health care (and then finding out nobody likes the idea), weddings, work, plotting and planning trips to exotic locations and working on a large stack of books, I have some how managed to find time to do two things I love dearly - graphic art and working on my language.

Yes, you read that right.

I know, I know... I'm a nerd. A word nerd no less with a seemingly insatiable desire to learn/study ficticious and dead languages. Why, ask you? Because they're awesome! Dead languages are usually the grand-daddy's of modern languages, which makes studying the evolution pretty sweet. That, and if you understand the language, it helps you understand the culture and religion of any given society. Since I like studying societies too... well, you see the draw. As for ficticious languages - same rules apply, but only in a more glaringly nerdy way.

As for working on my language - it has a name, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep it. I may end up renaming the whole language and people group to which it goes before it's all said and done... but I digress.

The reason for even embarking on the whole endeavor is strangely similar to the reason I picked my major - writing. I decided that no decent ficticious world would be complete with out at least some sort of scrap of a language to go with it. Thus, when I started creating this little world 7 or so years ago (I don't exactly remember when the chaos started) I drew a map and set about a language. Seven years of language writing has produced a workable calendar complete with names for the months (but no holidays as yet), days of the week, runes for most of the alphabet, a (recently created) set of numbers, along with a few random words and phrases (none of which are set in stone). In addition to all this I have scraps of phonetics and grammar, sentence structure, and the beginnings of conjugations and tenses spread out throughout my ever growing stack of language stuff.

It's a headache and a half sometimes but I am enjoying the journey immensly.

The one notably tricky thing about creating a language from wishful thinking and imagination, is that once you start creating even a basic language, the thing comes alive and starts going crazy instantly. If you don't start out with some sort of structure in mind in the first place, you wind up with a crazy, half wild beast like the one I have. I have lists of words, but once I figure out conjugations and tenses and such, I have to go through my word lists and figure out what I have to fix.

Fortunately though, I do not believe I'll have to create a massive vocabulary for this language. I'm fairly well convinced that for my purposes I will not need to create more than a 'survival' vocabulary. The focus of this endeavor is language structure.

In the mean time, I'm still grappling with the question of - do I want my verbs to be like Spanish and have a basic form which means 'to do something', or do I want to be like English where the unconjugated verbs look like imperatives?

I've spent weeks and will spend many more weeks studying the grammars and sentence structures of various languages before I come to a conclusion.


Irony.

I know, I know! It sounds like I'm so busy on a side note to a greater body of work that I'll never get to actually writing a book, but that's simply not the case. The fact of the matter is, it is much easier to work on a language while being a full time student, than it is to work on a story. A story requires a massive amount of plotting, character development, and coherant ideas - all of which are things that require a lot of time that is not there while taking classes at college. Language writing however... while it does require a lot of thought, time, and etc. most of that can take place in your head and whenever you have a spare second. The hardest part, at least so far, has been coming to a decision on how I want to do something. Actual execution doesn't take very long. Most of my language stuff has been done on scraps of paper and while fighting off sleep during chapel or killing time between classes, or even at work. So once you figure out that you want all your present tense verbs to end in "-le" in the formal you form, you simply throw an -le on the end of the verb and go. See how easy that is? It's getting to that point that's the bear. Once you do though, a quick jot down on a scrap of paper and it's done, needing only transfering to the file where all the language stuff is kept.

Well, now that I've rambled on forever and proved my nerdiness, let me add a layer by saying I lament not being more strict with my 'poem-a-week' goal for this year. Where as I have written several this year, it hardly reflects the number of weeks gone by. Ah well, I believe it is more than I wrote last year, so I shan't complain too much. Though, I am almost certain I've written several poems that haven't been transfered to the computer yet, and are therefore unrecorded... now I just need to find the critters and get them put somewhere a little safer than a random notebook or bullatin back.

Ugh! I've been lacking on my calligraphy too! But that takes an exhorbitant amount of time if you really want to do it right... and even longer if you mean to put it on display or sell it... I've been asked to do a calligraphy piece for the living room, but I haven't found a text I wanted to do or the time in which to do it. I'm afraid by the time I manage to get back to calligraphy again I'll be so long unpractised I'll basically have to start over. Bah!

Oh, did you notice the music player posted at the top of the page? I'm sure you couldn't have missed it. I don't think anyone actually reads this blog, but if anyone does and wants to take a listen, please do! I love music and I love sharing it.

Anyway, now that I have thoroughly bored you, I'll close and try to think of something more interesting to blog about in the nearish future.

... I tried to think of a witty way to end this or find some awesome quote or something, but in the end all I could think of was...

TTFN! Ta-ta for now!