Re: [LANGDEV] Conversational Amman-Iar

[And Rosta <a.rosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

Mia:
> >While in Germany, I was discussing my odd hobby with some of my
> >wife's relatives when someone asked me to say something in
> >Amman-Iar.  While I was able, with great difficulty, to cobble
> >together a sentence or two, I found my obvious lack of fluency both
> >embarassing and difficult to explain.
>
> ARGH! I hate when that happens!
> The only thing worse than not knowing WHAT to say when confronted
> with "Say something in LANG-X" is not knowing HOW to say something,
> and people seem to find it particularly odd when you can't say
> something in a language that you invented. In my experience, anyway.

I have had this experience too. Though in fact I feel a similar sort
of embarrassment even among Conlangers, for it is still not even
possible to write a grammatical sentence in Livagian, even though it
has so far been twenty years in the making, and the publishable
information on it amount to no more than a few pages, even though my
notes on it fill many files. I feel like a desk-drawer novelist among
a crowd of successful and prolific authors!

However, I did on the other hand have the curious experience of
being interviewed for an academic position and finding that one
member of the panel (a non-linguist) seemed dead set at interrogating
me at great length about my conlanging (much to my embarrassment, as
at least Matt & Dirk will appreciate). (It is standard practice to
have someone from outside the discipline on interview panels, and in
my experience it is their job to ask banal, stupid, and pointless
questions and generally place the interviewee in the dilemma of how
much one should pretend the question is sensible when the other
members of the panel are aware that it is moronic.) At one point he
asked me what the Livagian for "tooth" (or "bite" - I forget which)
was and through some stroke of blessed and extremely improbable -
given the state of Livagian and my memory - good fortune (a) this was
a word for which there exists a completed Livagian lexical item, and
(b) I remembered it (it's "thakka", or at least was at the time), so I
was spared what might otherwise have been my most acute experience of
this variety of embarrassment.

--And