Re: Why conlang

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Heather Rice wrote:

> Why do you conlang?  What do you most like about it?
> (Just curious.  :-)
Well, it is an art form that fascinates me.

To me, it is both an exciting field of experimentation and a way to
communuicate my feelings about the universe.

My main conlanging project, which encompasses Nur-ellen and a few
related languages, is an example of the latter.  The Elves (as I call
them, though they are plain humans) whom I imagine to speak these
languages, think and feel about the world basically the same way as I
do.  They are an endeavour to create a virtual culture I can feel at
home in.  There is no better way to explore the mentality of fictional
people than working out their language.

But simply experimenting and playing around with languages and "what-if"
scenarios is also great fun to me, and this is why I work on such
projects as Germanech and Modern Vandalic.  And finally, while crafting
these languages, many ideas spring into my mind which I could not build
into any of them, but I find them to interesting to discard them; hence,
I occasionally sketch yet further languages in order to explore them.
(For example, I feel an itch to create a trigger language.  I can't do
that in Germanech or Vandalic, and it doesn't fit into the languages of
the Elves as I imagine them either, so I'll sketch another language for
this purpose some day.)

I don't remember when I started conlanging.  I have been mucking about
with fictional worlds since I was ten (if not earlier), and this
necessarily included inventing languages.  These languages, however,
remained extremely sketchy to the most part, but when I was about 15, I
remember (BTW, I am 31 now), I started a more serious project with a
dictionary and a grammar (unfortunately, it is now almost completely
lost).

...brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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