Re: Whatever happened to Aelya?

At 07:51 PM 4/14/2002 +0200, Chris Thalmann wrote:
>I found some lines of the language in one of the Conlang Relays, and
>on some other random pages (e.g. the "Call me insane" page), there
>seem to be no active page about the language itself.
>Which is quite unfortunate.  I find the visual image of the language
>very aesthetic, and it appears to be quite efficient too:
>
>"E eneiss che en abhog, maudo ne in en ech eil."
>
>Considering that I've had the sudden and uncontrollable urge to start
>a completely new conlang and do everything right this time <G>, a few
>insights of Aelya could prove helpful and inspirational.
>
>Aidan, could you put some info on the lang back online, or send me
>some per e-mail?  Punce vuga!
>PS: Why did you lay Aelya on ice anyway?  Did you derive a daughterlang
>from it?
    Wow! Thanks!

    Aelya was laid to rest because it was a daughterlang of Quenya, and
infighting and dearth of vocab there frustrated me to the point of
linguacide. It's now been replaced by Taalennin, which is unrelated (though
still shows some Quenya and Sindarin influence).

   I'm not sure what you're looking for as far as hints and advice go, but
here are some of the most important guiding factors I've used before and now:

   - basic concepts shouls have shorter words, in general, and moe complex
ones sholdbe longer. Eyes, for example, are pretty dang basic, so the word
for eye should be pretty short. Chariots, on the other hand, could be a lot
longer.

   - devise a realistic orthography. using ascii only to represent a lang
has been done (especially among nonliterate cultures), but it lacks
aesthetic beauty to me. If you can't reconcile the need for othography, a
handy excuse is that the first linguist, working in the 1700's or whenever,
used this system to represent sounds, and it stuck, with some modification.
Without a nice orthography, it looks like a scrabble board vomited. IMHO,
of course!

   - It really helps to have a model for syntax and grammar. Something to
sort of follow, because otherwise the lang becomes cluttered with all kinds
of cool and interesting, but stylistically opposing, features. Having a
model, or a natlang origin, helps prevent a common Conlanger tendency to
put in everything.

   Let me know if there's anything else you want to know about Aelya, and
I'll see if I can find or remember what it did... Searching the archives
for Daniel Andreasson's Cein will prove fruitful too.

    Aidan