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

Sai Emrys wrote:
> On 10/15/07, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Could you elaborate on this? It could potentially be quite interesting.
You'd want something really basic for those players who just want to use
it to create names. There could be other uses that have an effect on
gameplay, such as using words of the language as passwords or hints. But
you'd find more elaborate information scattered around for players with
more of an interest in languages, which doesn't have any real use
in-game, other than being an aid to role-playing.

> What about non-online games? For instance I was playing Starcraft
> lately (and SC2 comes out at some point soon...); it has a Protoss
> 'language' and Zerg...whatever one might dignify it with :-P. But
> neither, I think, is particularly thought out.
>
> How viable/useful would it be to have these incidental(?) bits of
> conlanging be better fleshed out?
It would depend on the game, but I think it could be useful in a fantasy
or science fiction type of setting. Jade Empire had its Tho Fan
language. In a non-online game, you'd be limited to what you can script
ahead of time. Unfortunately, the sorts of games I've been working on
lately don't have any use for fictional langs.

>> 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!
>
> *laugh* That sounds quite neat.
>
> How much response did you get re Gargish overall? Do you know how fans
> / normal players of the game reacted? Did they notice? Gloss over it?
> Suddenly become conlangers? Form a posse and get some pitchforks and
> torches to defend the Mother Tongue? :-P
Not much reaction as far as I know, but the mail wasn't addressed to me,
so there may have been more of it that I didn't hear about. And the
stereotypical weapon of the Gargoyles is the boomerang. :-)

There was someone who contacted me recently about the language, within
the last couple of years, but I didn't have much information beyond what
was already on the EA web site (which was based on the internal
documentation that I wrote).