Interview With Sally Caves

Sally Caves has written for television ("Hollow Pursuits," a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, and she co-authored "Babel," a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode). She's published a few short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the premier periodical for speculative fiction, as well as elsewhere. She has finished one novel and started another, this one about invented languages. She sums herself up as "an artist by avocation, a calligrapher, an illustrator, an historical linguist, a burgeoning ballroom dancer, and a mediocre but enthusiastic ice-skater." LangMaker.com talked with her through the impersonal medium of a web form. The answers were anything but impersonal.

Q: What is unique about your language?

A: What is unique about Teonaht? Well, let's see. For the most detailed description, see my
"What is Teonaht?" page. Its formal written form requires an OSV word-order, one of the rarest of word-orders. It can front the subject, making a kind of SOV, but it still repeats the pronoun before the verb. Verb is final. It's a nominative language, but it makes a distinction (like many active languages) between ''volitional'' and ''non-volitional'' verbs and subjects, so that the nominative has two forms: ''agent'' and ''experiencer,'' which is also reflected in the verb forms as well. It is zero copula in the present tense, and it has what I call ''the Law of Detachment,'' whereby affixes can switch from final to initial position in a word for rhetorical or prosodic purposes. The Law of Detachment also allows the tense suffix to detach and prefix the pronoun, something Gerald Koenig admired and adopted for NGL. It's putatively Indo-European, in that it has a number of IE word-roots, but it draws very heavily from an unknown language called ''Nenddeyly.'' This appears to have been an inflected language. Teonaht, on the other hand, has lost most of its cases.

Q: What other languages inspired it?

A: When I was first exposed to Spanish, as a nine-year-old, I was so impressed that the adjectives followed instead of preceded the noun. That was one of the first rules of Teonaht. I subsequently studied French, German, Old English, Old Norse, Old French, medieval and modern Welsh, Old Irish, Latin, and I've dabbled a bit in Basque, Hebrew, and Greek. My one regret is that I never formally studied ancient Greek. But I did learn the alphabet at a very early age, and that also galvanized me when I was nine or ten to produce my own alphabet, heavily ''Cyrillic.'' I would say that some of the peculiarities of Welsh have influenced Teonaht. I tried to avoid the most obvious peculiarities, like initial mutation (although lenition forms an important feature of the vocative in Teonaht); I borrowed instead the Welsh and Hebrew way of forming some relative clauses: The boy, red his hair, I saw. ''I saw the boy whose hair is red.''

Q: What are the design principles of the language?

A: I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Teonaht developed over a period of thirty years. Much of that was hit or miss, instinct, inspiration, and sheer shenanigan. I only started giving it intense linguistic scrutiny about fifteen years ago, when I developed the law of detachability and the zero-copula. A year and a half ago, I joined conlang and picked up some useful terms. Under the kind ministrations of my fellow conlangers, Teonaht developed the volitional/non-volitional distinction that it was tending towards. I didn't set out to design Teonaht with any specific ''principle'' in mind. It was a product of my childhood and early adulthood, and has ballooned into a creative obsession.

Q: How many words are in the Teonaht dictionary?

A: Far fewer than actually exist. I'm inputting them by hand from old notebooks. I think about five hundred and growing. Beyond that, I have no idea how many words I've made up. Over two thousand?

Q: Are any other people beside you involved or interested in Teonaht?

A: None, alas. Interested in it? Well, some of my fellow conlangers, of course. Before that, I thought I was the only one doing this kind of thing. My parents and siblings have always been supportive and admiring, but they were never about to engage in this pursuit with me. No one wants to learn it, not even my darling husband. Except for a few strategic words!

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