Re: Changes of conlangs and their speakers (was Re: Skerre Play Online)

Hi,

I have no little tale to tell like Mark Reed (Kudos, 't
was great!), but -- for me it was the case that language
has always played an important role in my family somehow
-- my mother studied English and French for translation at
university. My father has not studied languages, but can
nevertheless speak English and French very well and today
still likes to use Denglish or proper English from time to
time, just for fun. Sentences like "Pass me the salt,
please" are not unusual to be heard at lunch, instead of
"Gib mir mal das Salz", which you'd rather expect.

So it came to pass that my parents spoke in either English
or French when they talked about something little Carsten
shouldn't know. Of course this made me jealous and I
didn't like my parents to sometimes talk in a language I
could not understand in my presence ... little Carsten was
already intersted in learning to read in kindergarten, so
that he could already read (but not always understand)
easy things written in German before school. From what I
heard from others, being able to read in one's last
kindergarten year is not that unusual, but nevertheless I
have always been better in German than in Maths. I have
already mentioned this before, but for some reason I asked
my parents from time to time where some strange word I
didn't know (e.g. an everyday loan word) came from and
what its meaning was. The answer I always got was "So get
yourself an etymologic dictionary!" -- that was when I was
six or so.

Years passed and little Carsten reached his 16th birthday
and wasn't so little a boy anymore. Although I've always
hated learning grammar rules by heart, especially the ones
of my native language German, I have always done well in
English. I had recently finished reading LoTR, due the
availability/demand of the books at the library sometimes
in German, somtimes in English, and I was kind of
fascinated by the love of detail ol' Tolkien put into his
work. I wanted to know more about that weird Elvish
language(s <-- which I only realized later!) that wasn't
always translated in the book. While doing a search for
Tolkienean stuff on the internet, I eventually stumbled
over the "Ardalambion" page and read it with interest.
>From there I eventually also found Mark Rosenfelder's
language construction kit and gave it a try, just for fun.
And thus was born the Nameless Language. And later
Daléian. And later Ayeri. And Tarsyanian. And Ukele.

Like David Peterson already said, his first language was
more or less a clone of English. Since I'm a native
speaker of German, mine was more or less a clone of German
of course. The only text I have in it is the Babel Text,
and I was soon bored by the language. I still don't
recognize it as a properly done conlang anyway. However,
the next thing I did was coming up with Daléian. Since its
grammar was written in just two months, you can already
guess that I haven't come very far with this either. No
Babel Text this time. This language I also discarded
because it was too much like the two next best languages I
meanwhile knew -- English and French, though for
exoticness, I rather leaned towards the latter of these,
since English seemed too boring. Just as boring were the
three vowels /a/, /e/, /i/. So I started Ayeri finally.
That was in 2003. The history of Ayeri can be read in the
current issue of the Conlanger.com Journal (Google for it,
or search conlanger.com/cbb, I don't know the address of
the PDF file). However, I could not let go of Ayeri
anymore for some reason, although I was bored by it from
time to time. It was also the first conlang which I
considered proper and which has been changing from time to
time. I don't know anymore what I changed, but it was not
too much that changed, only one little detail at a time.
The problem is that I am too lazy to change big parts of
the grammar because I have already translated some texts.
It would be too cumbersome to go back and change them all
again ... So Ayeri as it is today has not changed very
much during the last year.

I also mentioned Tarsyanian and Ukele above, both of which
were side projects of mine but are still sketchy. I have
started to write a grammar for them, but I have not yet
come past introducing the main idea of the grammar (Tsy
has an active alignment and Uke has both a nom/acc and
abs/erg system depending on an underlying system of
"agent-likeliness" which is realized in Bantu-like noun
classes). Ayeri however is meanwhile able to handle rather
difficult constructions, though still not without
headache, but it's more elaborate than any of my previous
tries. What it still lacks, and this will be a future goal
of course, are different registers of speech, synonyms,
style, poetry, and little irregularities in the grammar,
the lack of which I'm most worried about. The lexicon
already has got some irregularities built in, though.

Cheers,
Carsten

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Tingraena, Tyemuyang 12, 2315 ya 26:16:21 pd