Re: juvenalia (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

Hallo!

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
> >
> >>> .... 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.
As I said before, there were never any notes on the auxlang
I dabbled with about 1980 or so.  It was far too little to
speak of an actual conlang - just some ideas about grammar
(all I remember are the gender markers) we discussed but
never put into practice.

> 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 didn't know what Esperanto was like until 1989, when I
attended a music performance which featured songs in
Esperanto, and someone handed out a leaflet which summed
up the grammar of Esperanto and listed a few hundred
words.  So what I made up in my teens wasn't influenced
by Esperanto, at least not in substance.  My main source
of inspiration were, as I said before, the inflectional
paradigms of Latin, which meant that many of my early
conlangs worked pretty much like Latin.

The first "real" conlangs, with some grammar and a handful
of words, were ones I made up for a space-opera-style
fictional setting featuring a starfaring high-tech
civilization that existed on Earth about 12,000 years ago.
That was in the mid-80s, when I was 15 or 16 years old.

I made up the language of those starfarers, which had an
agglutinating (I think) morphology, with similar cases and
tenses as Latin, and a Novial-style (not that I knew Novial
back then) overt marking of gender by final vowels.  I also
derived from it a language spoken on a planet of Tau Ceti
colonized by those starfarers - not by regular sound changes
(a notion which wasn't yet known to me), but by randomly
altering words.  Even though 12,000 years lay between the
two languages (the younger language was meant to be spoken
in the present era), the words were still recognizable
and the grammatical typology hadn't changed the least,
except that it had developed suffixaufnahme (which perhaps
also was present in the ancestral language, I no longer
remember).  (Of course, I hadn't heard of suffixaufnahme
back then, didn't know any natlang that has it, nor the
term; but I thought that if a genitive modifies an NP,
it would make sense to inflect it like an adjective.)

Those languages were abandoned when I tossed that corny,
Dänikenian happentrack.  The Tau Ceti planet was later
recycled in a slightly less absurd space opera setting
which, however, itself lies abandoned now.

After I made those languages, I didn't conlang much,
just invented names for fictional settings which I tried
to sound consistent in style for each culture.  That was
until I stumbled upon this on the Net in early 2000,
at the ripe old age of 30, during a phase of increased
interest in Tolkien's legendarium (which I, of course,
had discovered much, much earlier):

http://www.alt-tolkien.com/r13home11.html

As I had also discovered Ardalambion, I started working
out a language descended from Sindarin to be spoken by
those modern-day Elves.  I called the language "Nur-ellen",
which in the language itself meant "Low Elvish".  Some
list members perhaps still remember it.  It was the reason
why I joined CONLANG.  Later, the modern-day Tolkienian
Elves mutated into ordinary human beings with an Elvish
culture, and the language was completely dismantled,
"de-Tolkienized" and rebuilt, incorporating lots of fancy
ideas such as Novial-style gender marking, suffixaufnahme
and active/stative morphosyntactic alignment (it thus
owes quite much to my old projects, but also to exciting
things I saw here on CONLANG): the result was Old Albic.

> > 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.......
Indeed.  It is easy to come up with a few hundred words
and a simple grammar; it is much more challenging to build
something which is consistent in style and actually looks
like a real language in all its richness and complexity.
Tolkien was indeed very thorough in his craftsmanship,
always trying to improve his conlangs to the best he could
(which is part of the problem with the documentation:
he never produced a "canonical" reference grammar of any
of his conlangs).

> [...] 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).
Yes.  Tokana, Teonaht and Kelen are among the greatest
conlangs I have ever seen.  All these languages of course
weren't done in an afternoon.  They took years to grow to
their present magnificence.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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