A friend forwarded a link to a strange article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant, and his new conlang project.
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language—“Mänti”, meaning a type of tree—reflects the relationships between different things. The word “ema”, for instance, translates as “mother”, and “ela” is what a mother creates: “life”. “Päike” is “sun”, and “päive” is what the sun creates: “day”. Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
A quick googling shows that Daniel Tammet is the meme du jour. (The Guardian article has been slashdotted.) He has even appeared on the David Letterman Show. It seems that Mänti is only one of Tammet’s two attempts at a conlang. He constructed an international auxiliary language (IAL) called Uusisuom in 2001. I look forward to the publication of his grammar of Mänti. [via Maria still working in the belly of the beast]
Posted by jim at May 5, 2005 06:15 AM
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