Re: Is conlang a generator of conlangers? or a sustainer? (was: Oops!)

At 12:22 am -0500 8/10/98, Hawksinger wrote:
>Sally Caves wrote:
>
>> My other question:  how much was Tolkien an influence on your decision to
>> invent a language?
None at all.

>My impression has long been that there are 3 main external avenues to
>conlanging; Tolkien, Heinlein's Speedtalk, and Sapir-Whorf's Linguistic
>Relativity.
Never been along the other two avenues either :)

I haven't found Heinlein's Speedtalk avenue, though if I should chance to
pass that way I think it might find it interesting to take a peek at it.  I
have by Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Relativity avenue, but it had no effect one
way or the other on my conlanging; I got the impression (may be wrongly)
that the avenue didn't lead anywhere.  ;)

I didn't meet Tolkien till my late teens by that time I must've have some
three dozen or more conlangs beneath my belt.

I made no conscious decision to invent my first language.  It came about
somewhere about the age of nine when I realized there were other languages
(rather late, perhaps, but during most of my formative years WWII  didn't
make Europe a healthy place to travel in).  I discovered an etymological
dictionary & found it revealing that a language had a history & found the
Old English (or AngloSaxon, as they were then called) absolutely
fascinating.  I also discovered a couple of my mother's French grammar
books from her school days & I was hopelessly hooked on languuages &
linguistics!  I wanted to experiment - I wanted to create.  So out came a
language with a verbal system strangely like the French (including
subjunctives even tho at that tender age I didn't really understand what a
subjunctive was!) and a Saxon based vocabulary.

Shortly afterwards I discovered Grim's observations on the Germanic sound
shifts.  My brother & I had for some time (since we were say six & four)
had 'invented lands' (my own two boys much later did the same with
'Boogyland' - but my daughter was never so afflicted - is this a male
thing??); si when I was 10, 'my country' started speaking a sort of "future
English" which had undergone yet another Germanic consonant shift a la Grim.

Then at 11 I discovered Esperanto.  Wow! So someone else had made up a
language _and_ there was a perfectly respectable reason for doing it - to
give the world an IAL.  Even at that young age, I felt there were things Z
could have done better and from then one over the next six or seven years I
was churning out would-be IALs at the rate of at least two a year.  The
early ones were fairly "Esperantine" by they gradually got more life of
their own & tended to be infuence by whatever natlang I was avidly trying
to learn.

But the artlang side was not dead.  In the Eagle comic (an excellent
production of the 1950s) Dan Dare "Pilot of the Future" (a great hero of
mine  :) found a race on Mercury who had a strange language consisting only
of vowels sung on the notes doh to upper doh, and no verbs. It's my regret
that I never found out more about it at the time, and efforts on the
internet to discover more have so far drawn a resounding blank  :=(

Anyway, it inspired me to 'discover' on Venus a language with curiously
Magyar & Turkish inflences  :)

Anyway, by the time I discovered Tolkien, conlangs had been part of 'my
universe' for ages.  It seemed only "natural" that Elves, Orcs etc. should
have their own languages; it didn't strike my as odd or remarkable.  I was
impressed by Tolkien's thoroughness & the consistency of his creations, but
not by the fact that he had created.  What impressed me most was his
ability as a story teller able to sustain the LLOTR over three volumes.

Sindarin was so obviously modelled on Welsh phonology and, I'm afraid, here
I do prefer the "real thing".  Quenya struck me by its magnificent beauty -
but then, like Tolkien himself, I had found Finnish a very beautiful
language & Quenya's "Finnishness" was immediately obvious to me (and we
were both brought up on Classical Greek & Latin :)

No, Tolkien had no affect as regards a conlanging interest.  But he did
have one effect: to press home that if one is going to invent a language,
it should be done properly & throroughly.  But that has proved a
double-edged sword.  I want perfection in my creations & suspect that's
impossible.  Indeed, it's obvious that compromises have to made with my
briefscript - and as some know (and are possibly weary of hearing) I am
finding that difficult.  That's Tolkien's effect.

As for CONLANG, it re-awakened an interest which, as I've said elsewhere,
had lain somewhat dormant while my kids were young - but they have now all
flown the nest.  CONLANG I have found generally interesting & sometimes
stimulating (but AUXLANG has been a somewhat different experience ;)

Ray.