Re: Conlangs as secret communication styles

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 09:55:58AM +0900, Daniel 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.
This is totally how my mërèchi started out, and it causes problems for
me now that I want it to have a conculture!  Well, mërèchi was a hybrid,
partly an attempt to walk in Tolkien's footsteps, partly for me to make
notes to myself in.  So it has words for some modern things including
computers, but I don't feel they are entirely legitimate and balk at
including automobiles, factories and skyscrapers.  Then when I do need
to do some vocabulary building, I get confused about who they are and
how they would think about things.  So it is a language trying to be in
a fictional world, but failing.  (The closest I can come to the culture
is "sort of like India, but on a large (somehow cloaked and then abandoned)
island in the Atlantic".  I can't even decide what flora and fauna should
be there, and just end up making up names for the ones in my own
environment.)

tylakèhlpë'fö,
Amanda