I’ve neglected to post a reminder about the coming Louisiana weekend. Traveling east along mythic Interstate 10, Amanda Kimmerly and I journey from Austin to Lake Charles for BayouCon 2011, “Southwest Louisiana’s Original Fan Convention.” We’ll staff our table in the artists’ alley during most convention hours, but Saturday will find me on a panel discussing “xenolinguistics.” This will be followed later Saturday by “Inventing a Language,” the fourth instantiation of the workshop Amanda and I co-present. Come greet, come look, come by and buy. We’ll have books, cards, dice, kind words, high signs, secret signals and plenty of small bills for change.

“…give us this day an ironical voice, and deliver us from earnest, intelligent literal-mindedness as we would deliver the literal-minded around us….”

Robert Stikmanz reads from Sleeper Awakes at AggieCon 42, College Station, Texas, 3/26/2011. Photo by Chris Dunbar.

I posted the above as my Facebook status this morning. This afternoon I thought, why not? Why not invoke this sentiment in all seriousness? As prayers go, it’s more thoroughly benign than some, and holds out a beckoning hand to word play. I figure playfully is the safest way to make one’s own preferences known in the great vibration, and playfulness is an attractive component in a transcendent vision. Ergo, etc. etc.

“…honored be thy fames….”

These lines appear between fits of organization, as I get ready to visit James Rossignol’s Science Fiction class at San Antonio College tomorrow. Amanda Kimmerly and I are on tap to give our third presentation of “Inventing a Language,” our workshop on fundamentals of building your own idiom. It’s a subject close at hand these days, as work on a Dvarsh primer and glossary assumes increasing priority. Now that tomorrow’s materiel is in a tidy stack, it’s time to finish diagramming the falling conjugation.

“…on earth as our hearts imagine it….”

Remember, reperiolinguistics is a term I have proposed for the study of invented languages. Please try to work it into at least one conversation each day. Please also plug it into your favorite search engine as often as possible. If you do these things frequently enough, a time will come when Wikipedia will stop deleting the articles on us.

I am a long way from high school Latin and, to tell the truth, I was a mediocre student of the language way back then. Possibly because I did not attempt to drive down teen hormones by packing in so much dead grammar and vocabulary, I have retained a little of what I learned. Reperiolinguistics. As a label for this new field in which I find myself wading, it might do: the study of invented language. I put this out there as a consequence and corollary of that other field in which I accidentally found myself active, that of inventing a language.

First there was Dvarsh, which I basically constructed to give meaning to a system of writing I devised as a visual artist trying to create beauty. There followed this area of study, this contemplation of Dvarsh and similar artifacts, like Elvish tongues, and Na’vi, and Klingon. Reperiolinguistics. Unfamiliar though it may be, it still rolls out of the mouth like an authentic word. Is there an institution willing to dignify the term with a Doctor Honoris Causa, or would I have to halt all the other processes until I scribbled a dissertation?