Re: CHAT: The love of inventing & conscripts (Was: Re: I'm new!)

> [snip interesting childhood anecdotes]
>
> My conlang bug struck very young -- probably no more than 12 years of age,
> though at the time it was more of a conscript bug than a conlang bug (I
> had no appreciation of grammar back then). It came through playing
> adventure games that featured conscripts, and also through reading a book
> about cryptography and spies -- after a while, I started making my own
> conscripts, with the intention of developing a "secret code" that only I
> could understand.
>
> My first attempt was rather weak -- basically taking existing English
> letters, cutting them up a certain way and reassembling them another way.
> Being quite simpleminded then, I proudly showed some "encrypted"  text to
> a classmate, who promptly cracked the code using simple frequency
> analysis. Bummer. So, to make it harder to use frequency analysis, I got
> the idea of adding single glyphs for common 2-letter sequences, and using
> multiple symbols for the same letters (like the very common letter 'e').
Methinks this must be very common for budding conlangers-to-be.  I made
elaborate ciphers and language mixtures as young as 8, but since I had no
knowledge of grammar or a foreign language I couldn't acheive much.  Some
of my more interesting approaches included a syllabary where every English
letter became a syllable that was then spelled out.  The result was
something with extremely long words but which couldn't be immediately
spotted as a derivative of English.  Another thing I played with was a
correlation table where every English sound was mapped onto another
sound--usually consonant-to-consonant and vowel-to-vowel to make the
result pronounceable.  In a bizzare conlanging accident, the result of one
of these mutations was "ni" for "the."  I like the sound of it and put it
into my conlang, where it survives to this day!  Thus, the Yivríndi owe
their definite article to my earliest linguistic games.

I can see the warnings for concerned parents:  "If your
child spends a lot of time playing with codes, talking in
deliberate gibberish, or inventing made-up animals or cultures, he/she may
be at risk for becoming a conlanger!  This strange, addictive disorder can
cause those afflicted to stay up at night trying to develop better verb
paradigms, to wrestle with the intricacies of the subjunctive marker, or
to think they actually know what "ergativity" is.  Watch out for these
warning signs!"


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_