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

Sally Caves wrote:
> My other question:  how much was Tolkien an influence on your decision to
> invent a language?
None whatsoever.  IIRC, the very first inklings of conlanging were in a
middle school Latin class, but that was not a real language, just a few
experiments, some musings on language.  I remember I wondered if there
could exist pronouns to distinguish between two nouns (i.e., obviate).
Later, I read a book on Esperanto, which put a little more wood in the
fireplace of conlanging.  But what really got me thinking was a trilogy
by Harry Harrison entitled "West of Eden", "Return to Eden", and
something else.  In it, he discusses three languages, Yilane` (spoken by
descendents of dinosaurs), which was an interesting sound-image language
(body position clarified the meaning of the spoken language), something
beginning with a T, which was spoken by the main group of humans in the
story, and another language, which was agglutinative.  His detailed
description of Yilane`, and brief descriptions of the other two, ignited
the conlanging fire.  I then proceeded to create Tarni'f, which was
heavily influenced by Latin.  It had 7 cases: Nominative, Genetive,
Accusative, Dative, Locative, Temporal, and Vocative.  Locative was for
"prepositions of space", temporal was for "prepositions of time", and
the others were very similar to Latin.  There were four genders:
Masculine, Feminine, Androgynous, and Neuter.  Androgynous was for
animates whose gender is unknown or unimportant.  There were three
classes of nouns, similar to the five declension classes of Latin.
Class III was agglutinative, altho I didn't know the term.
Masculine/Feminine Singular was indicated by -s, Androgynous/Neuter
Singular by -v, Masculine/Feminine plural by -zh, and A/N plural by -b,
nominative was indicated by (-e-), genetive by (-i-), accusative by -a-,
dative by -E- (e-acute), locative by -fA-, temporal by -tE-, and
vocative by -A-A.  Adjectives could be comparative, superlative,
anti-comparative, and anti-superlative (less old, least old).  Verbs had
personal endings combining person (including a formal/informal
distinction in the 2nd person), number, active/passive, and
indicative/subjunctive.  There were lots of tenses.  The verb was formed
thuly: (prefix)-Verb-tense-person, with prefixes for conditional,
progressive, reflexive, completed, stable, and repitition (with three
allomorphs), immediacy.  Unfortunately, I never recorded what those
terms meant.  I don't know what the distinction between the perfect
tenses and completed was, nor what the distinction between stable and
repetition were.  I also had Latin-style gerunds, participles, and
infinitives.   There were three classes of verbs: -a^d, -ed, and -ud,
which differed in the personal endings and some conjugations.  There
were also adverbs which agreed with their verb in time (I ran
quickly-past/I will run quickly-future).  In the pronouns, 1st and
second person had gender, however the masculine and femine forms were
only to be used in specific (unspecified) situations, so I always
employed the androgynous.  The vocabulary had thousands of words.
However, I had never been very consistent with derivations, and so I
had, in some cases, random alterations to words.  I even created several
scripts.  The orthography was heavily influenced by English, with odd
mixtures of Klingon.  Here's the vowels:

a = [&]
a^ = [ej]
e = [E]
e^ = [i]
er = syllabic r
i = [I]
i^ = [aj]
ir = syllabic r, or "halfway between that and i"
o = [a]
o^ = [ow]
u = [V]
u^ = [u] or [U] (never indicated when it would be which)
ao^ = [&u]
eir, eer = "pronounced like the word air, or halfway between e and er
(rare)"
o^y = [Oj]
ier, iir = "like air" [Ir(syllabic)]
o followed by r becomes ar (or becomes o"r) - diereses indicated two
seperate sounds, instead of a diphthong
aar = ar or air
ou^ = "o and u^ run together, ow as in cow, or o^"
A few interesting consonants were:
tlh = Klingon tlh (lateral affricate)
th = [T]
thth = [D] (original written th with circumflexes over each consonant)
q = [x]
gh = [G]
k = [k]
p = [p] or [p_h]
t = [t_h] (?)
qq = "a harsher version of q", I think I meant [X] (uvular fricative)
r = "usually like English r, but sometimes like the relaxes d of ladder"
(i.e., a flap)
g followed by h --> kh ([k_h]?)
ly = sometimes like lli in million, or like an l or a y.  Sometimes like
zh.  (From Spanish, I didn't realize that Spanish ll was a single sound,
I though it was [lj])
' = glottal stop (that's how it was defined, but it was usually a schwa,
as in l'k'tara^d, to be absent [l@k@tarejd], in fact, the use of it as a
glottal stop was largely restricted to inflections.

Eventually, I tired of it, and the fire burned out.  Until I discovered
the Internet, and discovered conlangs.  That re-ignited the fire, and
I've been going strong since.

Come to think about it, I may resurrect Tarni'f, with some
modifications.

--
"A silent mouth is sweet to hear" - Irish proverb
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