Tag Archives: glossopeia

Things Always Planned Are Never Completed

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I’ve got so many projects of so many different kinds that I’m working on, that I will probably never get half of them finished. As an example, I have several languages which I have made up. I’ll give you a second to get over the shock of that… yes, I invent languages. Ready to move on? Good. Tolkien spent his whole life working on the languages Quenya and Sindarin, more-or-less non-stop, and he still, by his own admission, never got anywhere close to “finishing” these two projects. Yeah, well, I’ve got more than two made up languages, and I’ve got a whole bunch of other projects besides.

Therefore, I have recently resolved to try to release my projects in dribs and drabs so that, at the very least, some little things end up being circulated, out there, in the big wide world. I mean, it’s not just that some projects are lengthy; life is short, and you never know when “some blind hand shall brush [your] wing”, as Blake put it.

So you may soon start to see snippets of things which hint at larger works released.

© 2018 Bryan A. J. Parry

Shadow-outline @FiatLingua #conlang

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A nonce word is one made up on the spot, for the occasion — a one-off, one-time-use word, as it were. Recently I wanted to say “silhouette”, but the word would not come to mind — so instead, shadow-outline plopped out.

I was immediately struck with how elegant and self-explanatory this nonce word is. Since then I’ve tried slipping it into conversation, but that’s been quite hard — how often do we talk about “silhouettes”, in any case? But when I have used it, it seems to have gone down well. That is, nobody has noticed I’ve smuggled in a made-up word — and I seem to have been clearly understood(!)

So there we are. Shadow-outline. A nonce word worth keeping around, perhaps? (if I do say so myself) And it also does away with remembering how to spell that Frenchy word S-I-L-H-O-U-E-T-T-E.

© 2015 Bryan A. J. Parry

this post originally appeared on my other blog Wrixlings: https://wrixlings.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/shadow-outline/

featured image from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette#/media/
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