Re: juvenalia (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

--- On Tue, 12/16/08, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

> From: Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:36:12 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
>
> > deinx nxtxr wrote:
> > >> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf
> Of R A Brown
> > >
> > > My interest in conlanging started when I first
> encountered Esperanto
> > > back around 1980-1981.
> >
> > My first attempt was way back in 1949. I had found two
> French text books
> > with _loads_ of grammar in them (they had belonged to
> my mother
My first conlang was around 1952, as best I recall, and was inspired by Pig
Latin. I called it Pig Russian (Igpaya Ussianruski). Rather than the one
transform rule of Pig Latin, it had 26 different rules depending on the first
letter of the original word. Being a trivial relex, it had no grammar of it's
own.

I discovered Esperanto around 1958 or 1959, but I didn't care for it. A few
years later, in high school, I took Latin for a year and German for two years.
That gave me exposure to non-English grammars and made my several unfinished
conlangs less like a simple English relex.

In college, majoring in computer science, I took more German, a semester of
Russian, and two semesters of ASL sign language. While taking sign language I
devised simple system of "pictographs" representing each sign as I learned it.
Over the course of those two semesters my pictographic writing system became so
complete, and I became so fluent in it that I took class notes easily in the
conlang.

Many years, and three children later, all my conlang notes were lost in a house
fire, including around 2,000 file cards with my pictographic dictionary. From
time to time I still go back to trying to reconstruct my lost pictographic
conlang. Hence my PPP (periodic Pictographic Projects).

--gary

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