juvenalia (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

deinx nxtxr wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of R A Brown
>
>>> .... was never codified on paper.
>> All mine were    :)
>
> 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 when she
was at school - I still have them), and I had discovered an etymological
dictionary of English. The result was IIRC basically Saxon root words
with frenchified endings. I have no idea what the orthography or
phonology was like and I think any chance of my finding my notes from
way back then is well nigh zilch.

> The idea of constructing a language appealed
> to me and I immediately came up with "improvements" to E-o that
> could be considered my first attempts to make a language though it
> was little more than a relexified and rephonemized E-o.
It was about a year later that I discovered Esperanto & it did tend to
color my earlier conlangs from then on. But I've found in a 1952 diary
that for a week in March I made entries in some strange conlang who name
has a horrible ink-blot over it   :(
(In those days I used a fountain pen, not a ball-point).

But about the only concession I see to e-o is that 'the' = _la_ and a
lot of words ending in -o. The rest is quite different. There is
definitely no accusative case (Why did I bring it back in 1953!), and
the past tense of verbs seems to made in -ado. Altho some of it is not
entirely comprehensible (I provided no documentation of the language),
it is clear that: yez vahado = I went; yez vedado = I saw (It might, of
course, be that _yez_ is an auxiliary verb and that the -ado words are
past participles).

I see that by that time I had picked up s-cedilla from Turkish to
represent /S/, as 'television' is _televişono_. It also has _ç_ which I
assume is /tS/ in _açavo_ = eighth. But _c_ appears to be /k/ rather
than /ts/ as 'choir' is definitely _coro_.

[snip]
[Re Voldapeko - conlang of January 1953]
>> The improvements? I got rid of the nasty /x/ sound, and gave the
>> language the 'nice easy' English sounds of /T/, /D/ and /3/ -
> written
>> |þ, ð, ö| respectively. Oh, the folly of youth!
>
> Interesting because my first changes to E-o were similar.  I never
> removed any phonemes so I kept the /x/
It wasn't in English, so it must be a difficult sound and had to go  ;)

> but it was orthographically
> changed to <c>.  < c c g j h s u > became < ts tš dž ž c š w >.
Kept most of the E-o orthography, with the addition of the above three
letters, but /j/ was written _y_ and /Z/ as _ŷ_ ! I did not retain E-o's
u-breve, but I do not appear to have substituted _w_ for it (tho I
suspect I merely forgot to record that).

> added /T/ and /D/ using edh and thorn as you did.  I took it furhter
> into a Germanic direction with the addition of front vowels like / {
> y 9 / which were spelled < æ/ä y œ/ö >.
Not English sounds - so Voldapeko didn't have them! My _ö_ was decidedly
_unrounded_, lie the way we non-rhotics say the _ur_ in _hurt_.

> I also loaded the lexicon
> with a lot of Low-Germanic words
The name 'Voldapeko' would suggest some Germanic influence, but little
vocabulary I seem to have recorded, the vocab seems fairly eclectic.
The numbers 1 to 10 were: ayn, du, tri, tar, pen, hekþ, hep, ok, nuv,
dek (some Greek influence creeping in, methinks); 100 = ek; 1000 = duzen
(vaguely Germanic); 1 000 000 = milyon.

What an ugly duckling!

> and changed most of the suffixes
> likewise so that adjectives were marked with <-ik> rather than <-a>,
I remained faithful to Zamenhof's -a    :)

[snip]

I've found some entries in January 1954 in a distinctly different
conlang. This one is clearly influenced by Novial, e.g. passive is
formed with _bli_ (bli vince = was conquered), and infinitives are made
with _tu_ (e.g. tu vide = to see), the definite article is _el_ (Now
what gave me that idea   :)

The vocabulary seems to decidedly Romanic with the odd bit of Greek,
e.g. _kon pan di el korde_ = with all of the heart (Ach y fi! - fancy
imitating that peculiar English use of a 'partitive' with _all_ !!).

[snip]

>>> Sure, it isn't always easy.  Often you have things in
>>> your project where you don't know whether you should
>>> change them or not.
>> Very true - and asking other conlangers doesn't always help as
> advice
>> from different individuals tend to be contradictory - but that's
> the fun
>> of conlanging. Heck - if it was easy, it would be boring, wouldn't
> it!
>
> Which is why I like to make auxlangs.  There's a challenge to making
> something that has to fit within the mold of being useful rather
> than just making up *whatever*.
Surely properly crafted artlangs are not "just making up *whatever*" -
and my juvenile _auxlangs_ indeed seem more "just making up *whatever*".
Surely Tolkien's many notes make it clear that there are just as many
problems in properly crafting an artlang. It is because I admire
craftsmanship that.......

[snip]
>> I remember several years back some auxlanger asked on *this* list
> for
>> our top three (or was 10?) conlang candidates to serve as a global
>
>> auxlang. The request annoyed me, as I thought it inappropriate for
> this
>> list, and made sure none of my candidates were any of those that
> had
>> actually been designed by their authors as auxlangs. IIRC my
>> top three  were: Quenya, Tepa, Kinya     :)
It seems to me that the authors of these languages did _not_ 'just make
up whatever', but did work away at problems in order to produce a
coherent, consistent and well-crafted artlang. There are many other
examples one could give (e.g. Tokana, Teonaht, Kelen come to mind).

--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora.
[William of Ockham]

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