Sally Caves wrote:
> A. PROFESSION, DEMOGRAPHICS, INCLINATION:
> 1. Who are you, and what is the name of your invented
> language or languages?
Jim Henry: my main current conlang is gjax-zym-byn (/gj&'zUmbUn/).
Some languages I've worked on in the past include Thaurilarau and
Llegisia.
> *2. Are you new to the Lunatic Survey or have you filled
> out a version of this survey before?
I don't think I've done this before; I'm active on CONLANG-L
only intermittently.
> 3. Do you have a website for you language/world(s)? If so,
> please list the URL address.
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
> 4. What is your email address?
jimhenry at pobox dot com
> 5. What is your age? (vague answers allowed, but it is an
> important demographic)
31 years
> 6. What is your gender?
Animate. Oh, ... male.
> 7. What is your nationality? Where do you live now?
American. Duluth, Georgia (near Atlanta)
> 8. What is your native language?
English
> 9. What natural languages foreign to you have you studied
> or do you speak?
I can read French well and ancient Greek not so well. Can't
speak either.
Using a broader definition of "natural language", I speak
Esperanto about as fluently as English.
> 10. What is your level of education? i.e., your highest
> degree achieved or sought?
Bachelor's degree
> 11. What is your profession? Are you a professional
> linguist? If so, what also makes you a conlanger?
Network programmer and software tester. No formal
education in linguistics.
> 13. If you are a student,
no.
> 14. How long have you been developing your invented
> language(s)?
I think I developed my first skechy conlang in 1989, shortly
after reading Tolkien (specifically the Book of Lost Tales -
I didn't find the Silmarillion until much later). I started
work on gjax-zym-byn in February or March 1998.
> 15. At what age did you first start inventing a
> language? Can you briefly describe your early efforts?
I was probably 16 when I developed an Elvish language
used for names in a fantasy story I was writing. The
phonology was very Englishesque, and there was no syntax
to speak of, but the morphology was eerily similar to
Esperanto, which I had not at the time heard of.
> 16. What drew you to start inventing a language and/or
> constructed world? What was the inspiration?
Tolkien.
> 17. Did you start inventing before you had heard of
> the list or after? Before you had heard of Esperanto or
> Tolkien? (I name the two most common inspirations)
I had developed three or four very sketchy conlangs
that were all vocabulary and no grammar between about
1989-1995. In 1996 I discovered this list through
Jeffrey Henning's homepage. After I started studying
linguistics on my own, I developed several more naturalistic
conlangs for a world I was working on with my brother.
In early 1998 I started working on the language I now
call gjax-zym-byn.
> 18. Tolkien calls it a "shy art" and a "secret vice";
> but that was before the Internet. How secret do you keep
> it from others outside this list for much the same reasons?
I don't keep it secret as such. I often try to keep quiet
about it for fear of boring people, but when obsessed
about it I will occasionally bend my brother's ear about
the semantic or grammatical issues I'm working through.
> 19. Yaguello has called it "pathological," influenced,
> unfortunately, by a lot of psychiatric writings such
> as _Le Schizo et la langue_. To what extent have you
> encountered such reactions by outsiders you had taken into
> your confidence?
None, AFAIR.
> *20. Do you consider it nerdy to be doing this? This
Yes. Not necessarily a bad thing.
> 21. There has been a connection noted between linguistic
> and musical ability. Are you musically inclined? Do you
> sing and/or play a musical instrument? Do you compose
> music?
Yes, yes, no, and no.
> 22. There has been a connection noted between linguistic
> and mathematical ability. Are you mathematically inclined
> or inclined towards computing in any way?
Interested in math, not very good at it. I'm a reasonably
good but not brilliant programmer.
> 23. What other passions do you pursue that give you
> creative pleasure? (painting, drawing, sculpting,
> calligraphy, model-building, novel or story-writing,
> role-playing games, map-making, book-making, poetry,
> web-designing, star-gazing or other?)
Writing fiction, mostly in English, occasionally in Esperanto,
sometimes even in gjax-zym-byn. Map-making. Collagerie.
> B. FEATURES OF YOUR INVENTION
> 1. Pick the best term for the invented language you are
> currently invested in: auxlang, artlang, engelang, loglang,
> lostlang, philosophical language, or "other." etc.
Mix of artlang and loglang. Parts (the postposition system,
the conjunctions) are designed to be concise, symmetical
and thoroughly cover the possibilities with as few phonemes
as possible. The root noun set is deliberately idiosyncratic.
> 2. Is your conlang a priori (devised from scratch) or
> a posteriori (based on an existing natural language or
> drawing from a language class such as Semitic)?
The root vocabulary is mostly a priori, but some words
(~180 out of >700) are derived from words in Finnish,
Latin, Malaysian, English, French, Greek, Esperanto,
and a few other source languages (though often with
Volapukesque deformation to fit the phonotactics).
> 4. Do you have a script for your conlang? What is it
> called? Could you provide me at a later date with a sample
> of it? Is it on Langmaker's "neography" site?
Yes; it's based on the lowercase Esperanto alphabet,
with a bunch of additional letters for phonemes
not found in Esperanto. No, I can't conveniently send
samples. I don't have a scanner.
> 5. Briefly describe the outlines of your invented
> language (syntactical structure--VO, OV, etc.; class or
> type--analytic, synthetic, agglutinating, incorporative,
> accusative, ergative, active, trigger, other, combinations,
> etc.), noting what you have done with it that is innovative
> in your opinion.
Postpositional, agglutinating; fixed word order within phrases,
free arrangement of phrases within sentence, though OVS order is default.
> 7. How extensive would you say your invented language is,
> now? How big the vocabulary? Do you provide a vocabulary
> list or taxonomy on your website if you have one?
The dictionary contains >1400 words, about 700 root words and 700
compounds (some included because they are unobvious or idiomatic, some
simply to give examples of how certain affixes are used). It only
lists 34 out of the 306 spacetime postpositions, but the rest are
obvious. The tab-delimited dictionary is the most up to date part of
my website, though I'm working on updating other parts.
> 8. How do you build vocabulary? Some people pull words
> out of the air; others build up a base of root words and
> affixes. Many do both.
Both. I try to create a word from existing root stock
if possible, but will sometimes create new root words to replace
unweildily long compounds. Both the initial design of gjax-zym-byn
and my Esperanto writing style were influenced by Claude Piron's
_La Bona Lingvo_.
> 3. Does a constructed world accompany your
> invention(s)? What is it called?
Thaurilarau, Llegisia and others were designed for the Caligoi:
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/caligo/caligo0.htm
> *9. Has your language and conworld ever served in a
> role-playing game or a world shared by other conlangers?
My brother and I roleplayed in the Caligoi a lot for several years,
but that period did not overlap much the the time I was working
on languages for the people of that world.
> *10. Briefly describe your conculture (is it within the
> bounds of this world? on another world, etc.?)
A completely different planet, probably in a different universe.
> *11. Are the beings who speak your invented language
> human or alien? If alien, what features have you given
> the language to make it alien or how have you restricted
> or expanded its phonology? vocabulary?
The speakers of Thaurilarau, Llegisia, etc. are nonhuman,
but the languages I designed for them aren't particularly alien.
> 12. What do you write in it? Poems? chants? lullabyes?
> prayers? history? stories? recipes? Are any of these
> exhibited on your website?
I did the Babel text and the native creation myth in Thaurilarau.
In gjax-zym-byn I've written a great deal -
journal entries, story notes, stories, translations of several
Bible passages, and most of my development notes on the language itself;
but only a tiny proportion of all that is on my website.
Most is in paper notebooks.
> 13. Can you speak your conlang? Are you fluent in it? Is
> this a goal for you? Have you tried to teach it to an
> intimate? a companion animal? :)
Yes, fluency in gjax-zym-byn is my goal. I am fairly fluent in
writing and reading it, much less so in speaking it (I deliberately
made its phoneme inventory large and exotic, to stretch myself).
gjax-zym-byn was designed for my personal use; starting in
2000 I've been using it intermittently for my journal, especially
for recording dreams.
> 14. Have you made any soundbytes of your language? Could
No.
> *15. If you use Roman script, how recognizably
> "phonetic" is your writing system? In other words, do
> do you use unconventional letters or letter combinations
> to represent sounds?
The script is pretty much one-to-one phonemic, except that one
letter represents nasalization of all the vowels in the word rather
than a specific phoneme.
However, the ASCII representation is a superset of X-convention
Esperanto using many additional digraphs with "x" and "q" to represent
phonemes not found in Esperanto. Even I have some trouble reading it,
which is partly why I've mostly been working in paper notebooks.
> 16. How many of you sing in your language and have invented
> songs for that purpose?
gjax-zym-byn is not euphonious enough for that, unfortunately.
> *17. How many of you, for entertainment or any other
> reason, resort to gibberish? (This is in response to
Me.
> Adrian Morgan's question in December). Does it give you
> ideas for conlanging?
Not especially.
>(Have you ever fooled anyone?)
Fooled anyone into thinking what?
>How
> many of you have sung gibberish?
Me.
> *18. What on-line games do you play? (or
> devise?) Translations, Babel-text, Relays, etc.
I've occasionally contributed a gjax-zym-byn version
of some short text people are rendering into their conlangs.
> 19. Which do you prefer doing: devising
> phonology? script? structure? building vocabulary?
All of the above, at different stages of a project.
> 20. Do you start and stop several different conlangs,
> or do you tend to stick with one and develop it over years?
I've stuck with gjax-zym-byn longer than any previous conlang.
But I haven't worked on it or even used it continuously
for the last seven years. It's been intermittent, though I've
never gone a whole year without doing something with it.
> 21. What do you think makes a "complete" conlang, if a
> conlang can attain completion? What are your goals for
> completion?
My goal for "completion" of gjax-zym-byn is to think fluently
in it, only rarely needing to coin new root words.
> When do you grow "tired" of your conlang,
> or don't you?
I didn't grow tired of the Caligoi languages so much
as get more interested in gjax-zym-byn.
> *22. Which came first: the conlang or the conworld?
My brother created the Caligoi and I started helping
him develop them years before I started seriously
developing its languages.
> C. PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETIC:
> 1. What aesthetic features do you value in inventing
> language? Be specific as to phonology, structure, script,
> etc.
I like imaginative case/role marker systems that don't duplicate
nominative/accusative or ergative/absolutive languages. I like
isolation and agglutination. Script: I generally prefer curves to
angles. I like splitting up semantic space in surprising ways.
> 2. What commonly applied aesthetics have you ever tried
> to avoid in your invention? This has been an oft debated
> question, especially when it comes to Tolkien.
> 3. Is difficulty or obscurity a goal in inventing a
> language?
Not for me. For gjax-zym-byn, I wanted to optimize for high
exoticity and high learnability.
> 4. Is efficiency a goal in inventing a language? This
> question needn't cancel out the previous one.
Sort of, yes. One of the things I am most dissatisfied with about
gjax-zym-byn is how verbose it often is. I have tried different ways
to work around this without major redesign.
> 5. How natural do you wish to make it, or is that a
> concern? Or rather, how unnatural do you wish to make it?
I want it to be exotic, but not so unnatural that I can't
learn to think in it.
> 6. Can conlanging be sexy? sensual? obsessing? how does
> it heal or harm you?
An object of obsession, certainly. In fact...
...ok, I'm back.
Writing my journal in gjax-zym-byn, I find I can sometimes be more
honest with myself than when writing in English.
> *7. How many of you have developed a rich vocabulary
> of obscenities?
No.
> 8. Can it be mystical? To what extent does conlanging
> fulfill a spiritual purpose for you? Or a magical one? Did
> it ever start out that way?
I use gjax-zym-byn for prayer, though not nearly as much as English
and Esperanto.
> 9. How many of you have developed a rich vocabulary of
> magical, religious, or incantatory terms?
gjax-zym-byn has a good basic theological vocabulary, but I would
hesitate to call it "rich" yet.
Thaurilarau had some interesting terminology for concepts
in the religion of its speakers.
> *10. How many of you have striven to invent words that
> express novel ideas, or are not expressed in any natural
> language that you know?
Yes, that's one of my favorite aspects of conlanging.
> 11. Name a few of the words in your language(s) that you
> are most pleased with and are the most original to you.
{keq'pax} /k@'p&/: happy bewilderment. This is a mutation
of an Englishesque word my brother coined, "kamestra".
{pwiqm} /pwIm/: liquid water. Not original conceptually, but I like
the onomatopoeic quality.
{geq'diqm} /g@'dIm/: a wake-sleep cycle measured from one waking to
the next.
> 12. How do you sense that a word is "right" for its
> meaning? How much do you labor at fitting a sound to its
> sense? Or don't you care?
> *13. Do you ever rely on a software program to build
> vocabulary? Do those who don't think that's cheating? :)
I used scripts to generate random words for some languages, but found
the results unsatisfactory. In gjax-zym-byn every word has been
hand-crafted, sometimes adapting a foreign word to gzb phonotactics,
more often from scratch. I tend to reuse certain phonaesthemes, so
words in /pw/ are apt to involve something pleasant and words in /G/
or /q/ may be something unpleasant or dangerous, but this isn't a
classificational language like Ro.
If someone matches randomly generated words to a preexisting word-list
(one they didn't create and haven't hand-edited much if any)
I suppose I would consider that cheating, as being a kind of relex.
> *14. Is conlang a hobby, a craft, or an art in your
> mind? This has been hotly debated, so the question is
All of the above.
> not as weird as it seems. Can conlanging be considered an
> art? Why or why not?
> *15. If it is, who do you think are its consumers?
If the language itself is the work of art, then only those who (to
some extent) learn it could be considered its consumers. So most
conlangs would have no consumers. But a well-designed *presentation*
of the language (reference grammar or graduated lessons) can also be a
work of art; any such is likely to have a number of other conlangers
as its consumers.
> *18. Why or why not would you eschew the metaphors
> "miniature" or "model"?
Those terms fit some conlangs very well: my own Llegisia, for
instance. A more fully developed conlang is no longer just
a model, though.
> *19. Is a conlang more like a glimpse of something
> lifesize? (Irina's suggestion in 2001)
Depends on the conlang, I reckon. Thaurilarau (or my web presentation
of it) would fit.
> *20. There has been some invigorating discussion lately
> about what a conlang can do that most natural languages
> don't (such as produce OSV structure, or eradicate verbs)
> What experiments have you made with your artlang(s) along
> these lines?
gjax-zym-byn has an open-ended set of postpositions. It has verbs,
but many sentences consist of only postpositional phrases with no verb.
> *21 What do you think distinguishes a conlang from a
> natural language, if you think so at all? What would it
Its history, of course. Some conlangs might be well-developed and
naturalistic enough that they have no difference from natlangs per se
except their short history; most of course are too small, too
regular, or too unnatural to be mistaken for a naturally evolved
language, but these are not inherent properties of conlangs.
> *22. How much do you study other languages in order to
> discover what is natural in language? Or to discover how
> you can stretch the boundaries of language to make it do
> things that are unnatural?
I've studied the first elements of many languages. Lately I've been
trying to find out more about postpositional languages, especially OVS
and OSV languages, to validate or correct my design decisions
w.r.t. gjax-zym-byn.
> *23. Can such a language function?
I don't know yet. Sometimes I can write in gjax-zym-byn fast enough
that I hope I will be thinking fluently in it in just a few more
months. Other times I despair, thinking I must have included some
hopelessly unnatural feature that I am trying futilely to learn to
use.
> *24. There has been quite a bit of fascinating debate
> about the relevance of conlanging to linguistic study. We
> all know that linguistics can aid conlangers, but in what
> ways can conlangers aid linguists? Or does it matter?
It seems to me that one could study the limits of the human linguistic
capacity by designing almost but not quite naturalistic conlangs and
then seeing whether people can in fact learn to think in them and
speak them fluently. That way, you could distinguish between
universals of natural language evolution and universals of the way the
human mind/brain work. The Lojban project seems sort of like this,
and gjax-zym-byn is similar in some ways; but these hardly seem like
true scientific experiments since we're changing many variables at
once and have no control groups. A real experiment would involve two
or more conlangs identical except for the one feature whose
naturalness we're trying to determine; one might be a regularized
relex of some natlang unfamiliar to the experimental subjects, the
other would be the same but for one weird feature. The learners would
not pick which conlang to learn or know whether they're attempting
something most linguists think is impossible.
> D. THE LISTSERV
> 1. How did you first hear of this list?
From Jeffrey Henning's homepage.
> 2. How long have you been on this listserv or on other
> related listservs? Continuously? Infrequently? Off and
> on? More off than on and vice versa?
Intermittently (more off than on) since 1996.
> *5. How helpful has the list been in developing your
> language? In learning linguistic information?
It was pretty helpful in the early stages of gjax-zym-byn,
and invaluable in my linguistic education.
> *7. Do you peruse the websites of other conlangers?
Yes.
> *8. Do you sense that people on this list are interested
> in your conlang and give you feedback on it?
Sometimes, not often.
> 9. Have you ever set out to learn at least a little bit
> of someone's conlang, if only a word or two, or a phrase?
I learned Toki Pona pretty thoroughly last summer, but quit using it
during a long illnesss in the fall.
> *10. Do you peruse Jeffrey Henning's Langmaker.com site?
Occasionally.
> *11. What on-line techniques do you use to showcase
HTML.
> 12. Have you ever tried to introduce a friend to the list?
I mentioned it to a linguistics-inclined sf author I met
at Worldcon last year; I don't think she showed up here,
but I'm not sure because I went nomail myself shortly after.
> 13. Do you know of anyone who does this kind of thing but
> who has never heard of the list?
I've heard of someone - a friend of a friend of my brother's
- but haven't met him yet.
> *14. What other lists do you frequent related to
> conlanging?
I used to be active on the Toki Pona list. Plus various lists
relating to Esperanto, of course. I subscribed to use_your_conlang
but it's been mostly inactive.
> *15. What do you think will be the future of the list? I
> see it giving birth to alternate lists like Conworld,
> Lostlanguages, Romlang, etc. What improves the present
> list and its helpfulness or entertainment value?
The schisming of the list into more specialized lists may not be a
good thing. The smaller lists tend to lack enough subscribers to keep
steady conversation going.
> *16. What Internet technology would you most like to
I'm still figuring out how to represent gjax-zym-byn satisfactorily in
Unicode.
> *18. There has been some terrific talk about CONLANG as a
> community. And yet so many of us seem to want the world to
> know of it and respect it. Is the CONLANG community enough?
I would like to be sure that everyone who does conlanging knows
about the list, even if they then choose not to subscribe.
> *19. .....
> To what extent has
> the list increased obsessive development in you? Would you
> be inventing as furiously as you are without the list or
> knowledge of other inventors?
Some of my most active periods of work on gjax-zym-byn have been in
during periods when I wasn't subscribed to CONLANG. But
the list has been helpful in pushing me to flesh out aspects
of the language that I might otherwise have overlooked.
> 20. If asked whether it is not better to turn your
> linguistic talents to the learning and speaking of natural
> languages (a common response I've met with and aimed
> at criticizing introversion or solipsism), how would
> you answer?
I don't see it as either/or. The time I spend conlanging is taken
away from reading fiction, rather than from studying Greek. But I
don't think I've gotten that response from anybody yet.
> *22. What would Tolkien have done with such a community? He
> writes in "A Secret Vice" that language inventors "hardly
> ever show their works to one another, so none of them know
> who are the geniuses at the game, or who are the splendid
> 'primitives'." He suggests that perhaps in a later time
> language invention will become respectable, and such things
> can be exhibited. Have we reached that time?
I reckon so. The audience for conlangs will always be small
compared to the audience for narrative fiction, but it's large
enough now to make it worthwhile to spend time editing one's
grammar, lexicon etc. to make it fit for public
consumption.
> *23. Is there a danger that over-exposure can make
> conlanging "banal"? To what extent is it exciting because
> it is a) considered disreputable, "corny" or "mad," or b)
> largely unknown to the world? Does it have a fizzle-out
> date? In other words, is it just a fad, or is it a natural
> human inclination that will stand the test of time?
I find that, over time, I am less likely to be interested in reading
through another conlanger's entire online grammar. This is probably
because in many cases I've seen most or all the features before, in
natlangs or other conlangs. But then I discover something like
Ithkuil and my faith in humanity is restored. :)
> Finally, may I have your permission to use any of this
> material of yours for my academic work on conlanging? First
> name? last name? pseudonym? anonymous?
Yes, you may use my name.