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

From:Raymond A. Brown <raybrown@...>
Date:Saturday, October 10, 1998, 9:18
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.