Re: How did you find out that there were other conlangers?

Michael Potter wrote:

> I never cared much for language classes in school. I always hated
> English, and I only took Spanish because it seemed easier than Latin,
> and French was already full, and those were the only choices. But the
> idea of *creating* a language hooked me, for some reason.
Hmm... I wanted to take Spanish (my interest in Spanish dates back to
early 70's episodes of Sesame Street), but they put me in French
instead. Then a couple of years later we moved, and the new high school
didn't have French, so I took Spanish. At some point I started
collecting Teach Yourself books and borrowing anything language-related
I could find from the local library. I had a Dover edition of the score
from Prokofiev's _Peter and the Wolf_, which got me interested in
Russian. I learned from a magazine article that the language used in
_The Dark Crystal_ was inspired by Serbo-Croatian, so I found or mail
ordered a copy of _Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat_. Tolkien got me
interested in Finnish and Welsh. Before long I had more languages than I
knew what to do with.

But my conlanging goes back before any of that. I don't really know what
set it off; I've been making up words and imaginary places as long as I
can remember. The idea of making a language with its own grammar came to
me gradually, sometime in the late 1970's, and it may have been _Star
Wars_ or H. Beam Piper's short story _Omnilingual_ or some combination
of other influences that led me in that direction. I like to give credit
to _Star Wars_, but it could have been any number of things.

> I think that the best way to introduce potential conlangers to our hobby
> would be to go out and find them. I don't mean anything like a
> professional advertising campaign, but the grassroots "activist" things.
> Everybody wants to be on MySpace or Facebook, or whatever the new site
> is this week, so maybe there's potential there. There are other online
> communities, like MMO games or something like Second Life, where
> conlanging could be "advertised". Especially if they have voice chat. ;)
Hmm, could be interesting to create a simple language for a fictional
subculture in an online game. You'd get exposed to it from personal
names, ancient inscriptions, etc. and resources with varying levels of
detail describing the language would be available.

I designed the Gargoyle language for Ultima VI in my spare time as a way
to add some local color to the world, with all the signs and books in
the Gargoyle side of the world printed in the Gargish script. It was a
pretty crude attempt at a language, but it worked. One day Richard
Garriott got a letter from a fan written in Gargish and asked me to
translate it!

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