Right, time for my first "superwaffle" of 2003 - ie a *very* long
post (*please* snip if replying!) where I simply write what comes
into my head, and do very little editing. And as the Lapine language
has been under discussion here recently, language is the topic I've
chosen (not, at first, particularly Lapine, though it will get there
eventually). Here goes...

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A very interesting thing, is the development of language. For
instance, consider this very simple (English) sentence:

"Are you a furry?"

It's a fair bet that 98% of the general public, presented with that,
would say "a furry *what*?" I'd have said the same a while ago, the
reason being that "furry" in standard English is an adjective and
nothing else. So it's been interesting to discover over the course of
these last few months that, in certain circumstances, it's a
perfectly good noun. (And even more interesting to discover that I...
but that can wait for a minute.)

But what, exactly, are those circumstances? This is what fascinates
me as someone interested in language ("linguist" is much too strong
for an amateur like me!). You see, having investigated this, though
as yet but a little, one thing that really jumps out at me is how
little agreement there is on what the word actually means: it's
tremendously vague, even by internet standards. If you look at ten
people's ideas of how "furry" should be defined, you'll be lucky to
get fewer than, say, eight different answers. A lot of people discuss
this, but in general it's from the point of view of "furrydom"
itself; I'll have a go from a rather more linguistic perspective.

The big bone of contention on this is whether "furry fan" and "furry"
are interchangeable, or whether "furry" on its own is restricted to
the more "involved" end of the spectrum, lifestyling and such. In
general, it would seem that as time has gone on, the definition has
become more elastic and liberal and the two phrases have become
partially merged - I read a text from 1990 that made a very clear
distinction between "fans" and "furries", which most now don't seem
to do. The alt.fan.furry FAQ (to use a well known example) gives a
very brief definition of "furry":

a) An animal-like character known as a "furry"
b) A person who is a "furry fan"

So, as far as they're concerned, the two are pretty much
interchangeable. I rather suspect that this change has had some
influence on the fact that another word, "fur", has turned up as
well. This one *does* seem to be confined to the lifestyler
contingent, eg in the charter to alt.lifestyle.furry: I've come
across plenty of non-lifestyling fans who call themselves "furries",
but none who call themselves "furs". Further to this, leaving out the
indefinite article in my original sentence would make a fair bit of
difference to many - saying "I am *a* furry" feels much broader than
saying "I am furry", which again implies the lifestyling subset.

One thing that's very noticeable is the degree to which people
are "left to their own devices" when deciding what does, or doesn't,
count as "furriness". In fact, one might even go so far as to say
that "you're a furry if you think you are". It would be fairly easy
to consider everyone in this group "a furry", as (presumably) we all
identify strongly with at least one lot of anthropomorphised animals.
Conversely, you could just as well restrict it quite severely on the
grounds that many of us are "just" fans. It all depends on how you
personally interpret the language.

For what it's worth (not a lot!), after testing the various phrases
out loud, I would certainly consider myself "a furry fan",
probably "a furry", probably not "furry" and certainly not "a furry
lifestyler". That seems a reasonable spectrum, though even here there
is some blurring - I suppose that if you *really* stretched things,
you could consider chatting in Lapine to be a rather specialised
aspect of lifestyling, though I don't really think of it as such. In
my case, it's simply that I consider that my feelings towards rabbits
(not just about WD, though of course that's the most important
factor) are considerably deeper and more complex than merely "being a
fan", but I don't, for example, consider myself a rabbit "trapped" in
a human body. What really counts, I think, is feeling comfortable
with which words you use, and I feel right saying "I am a furry", so
that's the one for me. You want to disagree, fine. Let a thousand
cowslips bloom. (Actually, don't. Eat them instead.)

Let's face it, there are an awful lot of people out there who think
we're all mad just for taking WD seriously at all, or even for liking
any athropomorphic fiction. Most of these people haven't actually
*read* the stuff, but that's beside the point as far as they're
concerned. So how on earth those people are going to take this post,
which is about to discuss Lapine in some depth and at serious length,
I dread to think. Shame, innit? =;)

(A short [by my standards] digression here, before we get onto Lapine
itself: a minority of people apparently consider that Watership Down
is "not furry" because the rabbits are in some way "not
anthropomorphised enough". Well, of course they're entitled to that
opinion, but I certainly don't share it. The WD rabbits are possessed
of speech and rationality, which [so far as we know!] real rabbits
don't have. Just because they don't wear clothes or walk bipedally,
and you can't actually *see* these features, doesn't, in my book,
stop them being anthropomorphs. In other words, furry. Is WD furry? I
would say yes, without question.)

Now then, on to Lapine. (At last!) As I've said a couple of times
before, I never intended to take it remotely as seriously as I now
do. In fact, my first post on the subject was quite emphatic that it
*wouldn't* be me who did any future dictionary. How times change! =:)
Even when I did get interested in Zoe Kealtan's work, and tried my
hand at a little page about Colloquial Lapine based on what she'd
done, it was really only as a little bit of fun. That persisted for
perhaps the first month, and you can see the process at work in the
Units of "Frithaes!": for the first few, I say things like "I changed
the language", and "I made up this word". In other words, it's
treated as a game. The mock-serious References (all that "Adams, R.,
op. cit" stuff) betray that attitude.

Since about Unit 05, though, things have been different. As the
language has taken shape, and as it's been less and less a case
of "making up things", and more and more a case of things slotting
easily into place. If you do look at the course, you'll notice that
as things progress, the Lapine language and culture is taken more and
more seriously, and the viewpoint becomes
increasingly "lapinocentric", to the point that my warning in Unit 14
(that calling another rabbit "elil" is likely to get you killed) is
given absolutely straight. You'll also see that the References have
disappeared, and that the tone of the course has become far more
practical, as opposed to the rather airily theoretical stuff of the
early days. Eventually, I aim to edit the early Units to fit in
better with this new approach.

It's also the case that Lapine (the colloquial dialect, Naylte Hyao,
at any rate) is a language that values simplicity and robustness
above elegance of style. This, I think, is the major reason why the
whole edifice hasn't coming crashing down around my ears. There are
one or two bits of the structure which it's perhaps best not to
analyse too closely, such as the presence of spelling rules in an
unwritten language, but they don't seem to have caused insurmountable
problems. Even the inflected dialect (Naylte Éan) has worked
surprisingly well so far, to the extent that I've found it possible
to write poetry (well, an approximation thereto!) in it.

In fact, I think that Lapine has begun to behave in many ways as
a "real" language. It's now spoken and written by, ooooh, upwards of
half a dozen people(!); it changes over time; it has slang, idioms,
accents, dialects and register; a (very) small body of Lapine
literature now exists; and so on. Much of this has happened without
much in the way of conscious effort on my part. Interestingly, Lapine
has also proved that it has a proper language's most vital attribute:
that of flexibility. When "veheer" needed to be incorporated, it was
a fairly straightforward matter so to do and to give a halfway
reasonable etymology; ditto the way in which both "parli" and "tarli"
can be used for "buck/father".

One thing that was a must for Lapine was simplicity. That's certainly
the reason for using only three tenses, and allowing each to be
formed with "lay" or a derivative thereof as an auxiliary. Of course,
with the future tense, you can use either "lay zayn" or "layth". I
did originally say that the "layth" form was more formal, and
unlikely to be heard in casual speech, but I don't now think that the
gap is as wide as I originally thought.

The simple, "building block" approach to the language that I've
adopted also allows me to use new constructions without having to
mess around with entire new concepts. For example, I can use "an"
("but") to mean "although" or "however" as well. As a bigger example,
take this sentence from the bilingual "acceptance speech" post I made
here a day or two ago:

A laynt tring sai nayltil rul mes ol-kyt a laynt rooli!
(I've wanted to meet rabbits like you almost since I was a kitten!)

There are a couple of things here that I've not actually explicitly
mentioned in "Frithaes!". Firstly, there's the tense. "A laynt tring"
literally means "I wanted", but if you look at the sentence as a
whole in context (knew I'd get that word in somewhere!), it's clear
that "I *have* wanted is better. Secondly, "rul", which
means "equally", "the same as", is used here for "like".
Thirdly, "ol", which means "of", is employed to mean "since". This
construction actually exists in English: "she was his wife of ten
years". And finally, the "-kyt" suffix, meaning "nearly" can, like
its counterparts "-nyt", "-byt" and "-ryt", be stuck onto almost any
word, giving a great flexibility, which as I said a minute ago is
vital for a vibrant language.

I believe that I said some while ago that I thought 20 Units would be
about right for "Frithaes!", and that this amount would result in a
reasonably useable language. Well, I think it's pretty useable
already, but there are without doubt some very big holes still to be
filled. There are, for example, as yet no words for (among many
others) "cold", "dry", "sky", "dog" or "hare". All rather important,
and all for the moment "out of bounds". However, I think the point is
approaching at which the main subjects of lapine communication will
be more or less covered - the fact that I could write a 1000-word
story for Unit 15 with only a couple of awkward circumlocutions
counts for something, surely.

I'm not far off 2000 words here, so perhaps I ought to start winding
up now, though I could happily go on. Looking back at what I've
written here, I think that the common thread running through it all
is just what an extraordinary thing language is. You can pull it in
all directions, tie it in knots, and throw it about the place, and
yet it's still standing at the end of the day. I love it.

Frithaes,
David.

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