Mnemosyne: Juvenilia, part the second
Monday, 19 January 2004 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spqrbluesNext, we talk about made-up languages.
(This may get to be very embarrassing for me. But here goes.)
Aw, c'mon, admit it, I'm sure we all did it, even if we weren't destined to become fantasy authors. (Please admit it, I'm embarrassing myself to no end here.) As preschoolers bestfriend Christine and I developed quite a complex universe for the furry teddy-bear-like Mu's (their vocabulary consisting of the word "Moo") and the yeti-like, monstrous Ye's (their total vocabulary consisting of the word "Yee"). This made the English-Mu and Enlgish-Ye lexicons quite simple to memorise. But it was all, of course, in the intonation of the "MooOOoo."
In third grade or so, as just another part of our day-to-day play that might include jumping off progressively higher walls or climbing trees for a Jane Goodall-style observation of the neighbourhood boys or writing stories about ancient Egyptian goddesses, bestfriend Christine and I made up a set of alphabets. We drew grids on a page, and if I recall properly, she took the top grid, and I took the bottom, and we filled in brand-new letters keyed to phonetic equivalents. Twenty-six letters were insufficient. I think perhaps we settled for thirty-some-odd. My alphabet was called Kaokkian, and later I decided this meant the people who used this alphabet were from a country called Coyote. Dr Seuss' alphabet (and beyond the alphabet) books were a heavy influence here. It was the year I was also bestfriends with a Japanese girl named Mika Yamato, who taught us Japanese words, and with whom I later dutifully corresponded, precise penmanship on the outsides of the envelopes in both Roman and Hiragana characters (perhaps also Kanji, my memory of Japanese is fuzzy).
Let's see what else I can dig out of memory. Seventh and Eighth grade English would have been ages Eleven and Twelve, just in time for the previous blog entry's revelations. We were required to keep journals as part of our classwork. When I grew tired of writing about the schoolday and composing poems in the shape of cat's tails, I decided to write instead the long history of an imagined world.
Yoicks. I do still remember some of it.
Pier tel tintris selis Indgar atwer ociradyatu, Helat Umbiquar.
Before time was counted, there was only Indgar, and the two thoughts-of-his-heart, Hela and Umbiquar. So, you have Indgar the creator, who happens one quiet aeon to devise two new beings in the seat of thought, his heart. Hela is the bad guy; he makes a world of ice. Umbiquar is the good goddess; she melts the oceans that separate her icy realms from the freed fertile lands. Then all the happy humans have to sing assonant hymns:
Umbiquar, Umbiquar, / ya nactos an rivarë gar / Asos ahon ohteële
...yadda yadda...although we stand on shores afar—and, well, mercifully that's all I can recall off the top of my head. Tolkien was a prime influence, although by then I also had six years of French, a book on self-taught Italian, recent delvings into a book on Old English, and exposure to Greek and Hebrew and Gaelic from the neighbourhood, and a strange obsession with elision. Everything in the Velan language elided. The verb "to be" elided so thoroughly it was represented only by a squiggle that the speaker could choose not to articulate, or articulate as a final "s," or articulate as a long hiss. The object in Velan poetry (until the literary revolution in which hard consonants came into favour amongst the Velan artistes) was to combine words that would elide into the smallest, most compact form on the page,requiring subtle unravelling to determine the original meaning.
And why? Because by Eleven and Twelve I had discovered all sorts of beautiful poetic forms, and had lost my heart to the sestina, and became entranced by the games words play. Twelve and Thirteen was when I began taking Latin and discovered the words for all the poetic and rhetorical forms. Thirteen and Fourteen was when I wrote all my ideas in the margins of my looseleaf binder pages in elaborately calligraphic Tengwar, one of the alphabets of The Lord of the Rings, so that no one could read them over my shoulder. Occasionally I wrote an entire day's class notes in Tengwar as well. Tolkien's dwarven runes and elvish runes and the human alphabets that inspired them were too angular to appeal to me. The loops and swirls of his Tengwar felt lovely flowing out of a crowquill pen or a Bic. Even the day-to-day English of a shopping list was beautiful in Tengwar.
I also had a secret Tengwar, Tolkien's letters with an extra layer of encoding. The most secret, most frightening journal entries were encrypted in that. Beats me how to decipher it now. It's all right, though. Those secrets, I will always know every detail.
(This may get to be very embarrassing for me. But here goes.)
Aw, c'mon, admit it, I'm sure we all did it, even if we weren't destined to become fantasy authors. (Please admit it, I'm embarrassing myself to no end here.) As preschoolers bestfriend Christine and I developed quite a complex universe for the furry teddy-bear-like Mu's (their vocabulary consisting of the word "Moo") and the yeti-like, monstrous Ye's (their total vocabulary consisting of the word "Yee"). This made the English-Mu and Enlgish-Ye lexicons quite simple to memorise. But it was all, of course, in the intonation of the "MooOOoo."
In third grade or so, as just another part of our day-to-day play that might include jumping off progressively higher walls or climbing trees for a Jane Goodall-style observation of the neighbourhood boys or writing stories about ancient Egyptian goddesses, bestfriend Christine and I made up a set of alphabets. We drew grids on a page, and if I recall properly, she took the top grid, and I took the bottom, and we filled in brand-new letters keyed to phonetic equivalents. Twenty-six letters were insufficient. I think perhaps we settled for thirty-some-odd. My alphabet was called Kaokkian, and later I decided this meant the people who used this alphabet were from a country called Coyote. Dr Seuss' alphabet (and beyond the alphabet) books were a heavy influence here. It was the year I was also bestfriends with a Japanese girl named Mika Yamato, who taught us Japanese words, and with whom I later dutifully corresponded, precise penmanship on the outsides of the envelopes in both Roman and Hiragana characters (perhaps also Kanji, my memory of Japanese is fuzzy).
Let's see what else I can dig out of memory. Seventh and Eighth grade English would have been ages Eleven and Twelve, just in time for the previous blog entry's revelations. We were required to keep journals as part of our classwork. When I grew tired of writing about the schoolday and composing poems in the shape of cat's tails, I decided to write instead the long history of an imagined world.
Yoicks. I do still remember some of it.
Pier tel tintris selis Indgar atwer ociradyatu, Helat Umbiquar.
Before time was counted, there was only Indgar, and the two thoughts-of-his-heart, Hela and Umbiquar. So, you have Indgar the creator, who happens one quiet aeon to devise two new beings in the seat of thought, his heart. Hela is the bad guy; he makes a world of ice. Umbiquar is the good goddess; she melts the oceans that separate her icy realms from the freed fertile lands. Then all the happy humans have to sing assonant hymns:
Umbiquar, Umbiquar, / ya nactos an rivarë gar / Asos ahon ohteële
...yadda yadda...although we stand on shores afar—and, well, mercifully that's all I can recall off the top of my head. Tolkien was a prime influence, although by then I also had six years of French, a book on self-taught Italian, recent delvings into a book on Old English, and exposure to Greek and Hebrew and Gaelic from the neighbourhood, and a strange obsession with elision. Everything in the Velan language elided. The verb "to be" elided so thoroughly it was represented only by a squiggle that the speaker could choose not to articulate, or articulate as a final "s," or articulate as a long hiss. The object in Velan poetry (until the literary revolution in which hard consonants came into favour amongst the Velan artistes) was to combine words that would elide into the smallest, most compact form on the page,requiring subtle unravelling to determine the original meaning.
And why? Because by Eleven and Twelve I had discovered all sorts of beautiful poetic forms, and had lost my heart to the sestina, and became entranced by the games words play. Twelve and Thirteen was when I began taking Latin and discovered the words for all the poetic and rhetorical forms. Thirteen and Fourteen was when I wrote all my ideas in the margins of my looseleaf binder pages in elaborately calligraphic Tengwar, one of the alphabets of The Lord of the Rings, so that no one could read them over my shoulder. Occasionally I wrote an entire day's class notes in Tengwar as well. Tolkien's dwarven runes and elvish runes and the human alphabets that inspired them were too angular to appeal to me. The loops and swirls of his Tengwar felt lovely flowing out of a crowquill pen or a Bic. Even the day-to-day English of a shopping list was beautiful in Tengwar.
I also had a secret Tengwar, Tolkien's letters with an extra layer of encoding. The most secret, most frightening journal entries were encrypted in that. Beats me how to decipher it now. It's all right, though. Those secrets, I will always know every detail.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-20 03:21 am (UTC)I had notebooks of my own languages too, which I used some of in The Novel. I used to be able to write stuff in runes, but I don't think I ever mastered any of the Elvish systems. I can't remember how to say anything in any of the languages I came up with ... I know the writing system was an attempt to be logical, with sounds like "b" "m" "p" having similar shapes.
I wrote one sestina when I was 14 or so, and it was to fulfill one of the artistic requirements for the Queen's Own Mercedes Lackey fanclub/roleplay (I'm not sure how to describe it). It was about Vanyel, if you ever read the books. Oy.
If it'll make you feel better...
Far across the Darkling Sea
the elven people call to me
and from the tossing waves there swells
a paean of resounding bells
Bells of fine-wrought elven gold
My stay is done, my story told
I must go back to elven ways
and long for thee for all my days.
I can even sing it. :p I actually remember several of the poems and songs...yikes.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-20 06:32 am (UTC)I seem to be overcome with a need to read a simple, crystal-clear story about elves and emerald woods. Uh oh—see what all this swimming in nostalgia has done! Quick! I'll have to find a psychologically twisty gritty tome of urban magic realism!
Then again, those elven bells are sounding kinda nice, too.... :-D
no subject
Date: 2004-01-20 06:39 am (UTC)*hug* I think your story sounds interesting too, actually. I wonder how many good stories go undeveloped because the writers are too embarassed by their initial adolescent attempts.
I just need to read some fiction ... I read _Fudoki_ on the flight to Japan, and that's all I've read lately. I tried _Snow Country_ too, but it's the second in the list of Japanese Nobel-winning Novels I Just Don't Get.
(other)world literature
Date: 2004-01-20 08:03 pm (UTC)Re: (other)world literature
Date: 2004-01-20 09:04 pm (UTC)Most of the Japanese sf creativity, as far as I can tell, goes into anime and manga. For those I recommend the manga of _Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind_ (and the film), _A, A'_ (A, A Prime), _They Were Eleven_, _Appleseed_, the films Metropolis, Laputa, Ghost in the Shell, (Nausicaa and Laputa are both kind of straddling the fantasy/sf line.) There are probably tons of decent SF books that just don't get translated (translation is expensive). When I was in bookstores there were gazillions of Japanese fantasy and sf books. They looked so intriguing. Sigh.
Fantasy's a little harder to recommend. Actually, I was plannin a post of recommended anime and manga later. I'll see if I can think of any novels or short stories while I'm at it.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-20 01:25 pm (UTC)Naturally she fell in love with a half-elven border ranger, who had to be raised to the nobility for something-or-another, in addition to her renouncing her status as second heir, before they could be married. As I recall, they were given a small island to rule, far enough away from the capital that they wouldn't be an immediate embarassment.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-20 08:18 pm (UTC)I actually think my writing got worse as I sank deeper into adolescence; by my midteens my little maps had placenames like "the Bog of Unlife" and "Thitherland" (cringe! cringe!). Dizzy on fumes from undigested fantasy-reading, I guess.
I like the idea of the ditzy untalented elvish bard-wannabe. All my characters were so so serious :-)