Conlang influences (was: Lest Darkness Fall

Jay Bowks <jjbowks@...> wrote:
>
> Keep it going!  Could we have more read ups on
> our personal influences?
>
> I have to admit, that Star Wars and other SciFi
> (like Star Trek, with Klingon and Vulcan, and
> Dune) were great influences in my school days.
I've always loved to create fantasy settings and write stories
within them (usually the settings themselves are much better than
the stories!). My first influences were of hard sci-fi (Asimov,
Clarke, and various Golden Age dinosaurs). I tried to imitate
them, but couldn't help noticing that such radically different
places and times needed different languages. I had no idea about
linguistics or coherence, of course, but I wrote and drew maps
with almost no common ('real') names in them -- they were all
made up. Sometimes a sentence would come out too, and once (I still
have a typewritten draft) a complete song in the language of a dark
magic land called 'Treanda' (I think I'd turned to fantasy by that
time because I'd taken up Bradbury and LeGuin).

Then came Tolkien -- and then Internet at the university, and
conlang -- and voila!


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/