Re: history of conlanging (aka Conlang influences, aka Lest darkness fall)

On Sun, 21 Nov 1999 11:15:35 -0800, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
wrote:

>> At 5:36 pm -0800 20/11/99, Barry Garcia wrote:
>
>>
>> Well i'm probably the odd one out here, because I was never inspired =
to
>> start conlanging because of Tolkien
>
>Is the general consensus that Tolkien was the inspiration for most
>conlangers?  Oh I think not!  Along with Ray, and probably a number
>of others, I hadn't even heard of Tolkien until well after I was
>making up a language.  It was my mother who introduced us to Lord
>of the Rings.  She was very impressed by the appendix, and pointed
>it out to me:  Look, Sally! Here's a man who's invented a language
>and a script, just like you!  I remember a dark wave of jealousy
>and despair overtaking me at that moment.  I was thirteen.  !!!!
My first copy of _Lord of the Rings_ is dated 1980; the earliest =
surviving
coherent text in Olaetyan is also dated 1980, but Olaetyan had already =
been
in development for a couple of years by then. Unfortunately, I hardly =
ever
dated my handwritten notes in those days, so I can't know for certain, =
but
the language currently known as Olaetyan probably originated around 1978.
An earlier "Olaetyan" language, really just a list of words without any
grammar, existed before then, and a few years ago I rediscovered it
(amusingly, the word "phirfl=E9" which means "dog" in Olaetyan originally
meant "cat", but all the other words were entirely unrelated).

Based on the timing, it certainly seems like Tolkien must have been an
influence on my conlanging, but I didn't really study Tolkien's languages
until around 1984, when I read _The Book of Lost Tales_ with its excerpts
from the Qenya Lexicon. It's possible that H. Beam Piper's short story
_Omnilingual_, which I first read probably in the late 70's, might also
have been an inspiration. But you really have to go back to when I =
started
making up words, before I had the idea to put them together in a language
and wrap a grammar around them. I can't even begin to guess when that =
might
have been, since my memory doesn't go back that far. I just remember
trivial details, like the fact that I had an odd voiceless alveolar trill
[tr_0] that was written "lll" (yes, 3 L's in a row), along with a regular
voiced trill written "rr". (Of course, I didn't think of them in those
terms; they were just strange sounds that didn't exist in English.)

So whether or not I was inspired to conlanging by Tolkien (or Esperanto, =
or
_Star Wars_) isn't an easy thing for me to figure out. I can identify
specific influences in certain languages; for instance, I had no ergative
languages before reading R.M.W. Dixon's grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiny,
because the idea of ergative-absolutive morphology and syntax had just
never occurred to me. None of my languages are especially Tolkien-like
(except for some features of Ancient Elvish that were derived from =
Finnish,
for reasons of fictional history that are no longer valid). But I do =
think
that reading Tolkien (especially "A Secret Vice") had a major influence =
on
the way I approached conlanging in that productive early period from =
around
1982-1987.
--=20
languages of Kolagia---> =
+---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print =
any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no =
body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben =
Franklin