Introduction

What happens when an inexperienced language designer publishes an incomplete language design? And what if that designer is prone to endless tinkering and is over-sensitive to comments from others? Naturally the result is an ever-changing language and an unhappy language designer.

That is a summary of Vorlin’s life. Going public too soon. Trying to go in too many different directions at once. Trying to please too many different tendencies within myself and others. Those were mistakes. Terrible mistakes.

But in spite of all that, Vorlin somehow evolved from a crude encoding of English into a reasonably pleasant and unique language. By the time Vorlin was nine years old I was finding it difficult to explain some of its features. Attempting to discuss Vorlin with others became increasingly unpleasant.

And so I have ‘gone underground,’ allowing the evolution to continue on auto-pilot on the back burner of my mind. Vorlin is in there, maturing by itself, like a barrel of wine in the cellar.

This website is devoted to preserving the history of Vorlin. For whatever that is worth. Perhaps it can be a source of ideas for others who are fascinated by CVC words, or a cautionary tale for people who might be planning to publish prematurely, or a target of ridicule for smug partisans of other conlangs. There were certainly some important discoveries made along the way, such as the similarity of prepositions to verbs, the badness of unspecified transitivity, the desirability of expressing your own thoughts rather than frustrating yourself by trying to do impossible translations, and the specific ways in which a language designer can benefit from computerized parsing of the language. If anyone else digs into the documents and profits from these discoveries, then this website won't be a complete waste of electrons.

There is certainly enough information here to enable anyone to begin using the 1995 version or the 2003 version of the language, if they were willing to accept the grammar as it is and create more vocabulary by emulating the numerous examples that are provided. But I don’t think such people exist. However, if someone comes along who really needs Vorlin, it will be here waiting for him or her. —RKH

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