Re: Conlangs as secret communication styles

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 7:55 PM, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bowman@...> wrote:
> I've spent the last few months reading posts on this mailing list, and I've
> noticed that many other people are interested in creating "alternative
> history" languages or conworlds populated by various families of languages.
> It got me to thinking about how my language, Angosey, is  different.  I seem
> to have created it without much thought to who would actually speak it, or
> how it would evolve once spoken, or whether it resembles a naturalistic
> language.  It's my own idiosyncratic communication system, and I'm its sole
> audience.
gjâ-zym-byn is much the same -- created for my personal use, with
no associated fictional culture, not especially naturalistic and without
fixed engelang design criteria although with some engelangy qualities.
But I haven't felt a need to keep it entirely secret.  The phonology,
syntax, derivational morphology, and semantics are all fairly well
documented on the web (using a Unicode representation); the
script I write my diary in, not so documented, except in broad outline
without any images of the actual letters and logograms.


> I have never had much urge to create a second language, because Angosey
> fulfills all of my creative needs and I seldom tire of tweaking its grammar,
> to the point that early Angosey is somewhat hard to read for me now.
Once I started writing my diary in gzb, I made myself stop making
major changes to its grammar and lexicon.  I've made minor changes
since then, and lots of additions, but (in theory at least)
nothing that would make earlier text meaningless.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/