Re: Tell your conlang story!

Monica Byrne wrote:

> Here are a few questions to get you thinking:
>
> 1) How did you get in to conlanging? What was your inspiration?
I think the one thing that inspired me more than any other event was the
use of alien languages (with subtitles) in the original Star Wars. By
then I'd already been creating words for many years, but it was around
that time that I started putting them together to make languages. The
thing that originally got me interested in languages was hearing
bilingual songs in English and Spanish on Sesame Street back in the late
60's / early 70's. Sometime in the mid 1970's I saw a "Teach Yourself
Spanish" book in a bookstore, and began to study Spanish from the book.
As a result, my first language started out with a grammar that was as
much influenced by Spanish as English. But I like to think that Star
Wars (in 1977) provided the final bit of inspiration for me to start
designing my own languages.

> 2) What is your purpose in creating languages? Is it a personal art, an
> anthropological experiment, a pasttime...?
It's a hobby more than anything. Most of my earlier languages were
associated with my fictional worlds that I was developing. I've
occasionally written stories which use a few bits of language, and I
used them for place names in an old AD&D campaign I ran back in the
1980's, but it turned out that creating the languages was more
interesting to me than the other aspects of world building, story
writing, or role playing. It also gives me an excuse to learn more about
"real world" languages. Many of the features of my languages have been
inspired by one or more languages that I've read about.

> 3) How have people reacted when you tell them about it?
Most reactions have been positive, although not very many people show
much interest in it.

> 4) Did conlanging lead you places you never expected it to take you?
I actually had the opportunity to do a bit of conlanging for a game that
I was working on, Ultima VI, back in 1990. Richard Garriott expressed an
interest in designing an alphabet for the Gargoyles in that game, and I
thought it would be interesting if their signs and books in the game
were written in their own language. After an initial discussion with
Richard and John Miles, when I showed them an early idea for a word list
and alphabet, I took the basic ideas that came out of that discussion
and designed a language around them.