Re: Coming out & finding-the-community stories?

On 3/11/07, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> Tell us about:
> * how you 'came out' as a conlanger in any context (academic, social,
> parents, ...), their reactions to it, etc
I've had neutral or (more often) favorable reactions from
everyone I've told about it.  Generally speaking I haven't
gone out of my way to tell people about it unless they see
me writing something in gjâ-zym-byn and ask about
it; on such occasions I've told a few people at work
& church, besides family, and typically had favorable
reactions.

> * how you found out that others do this (i.e. all of us weirdos) &
> your reactions to that.
I had earlier been familiar with Tolkien's language creation
(through the Book of Lost Tales, oddly enough, not through
the Silmarillion or Lord of the Rings appendices).  In 1996,
having just discovered the Web through the college computer
lab (I'd been active on Usenet for two or three years
through dial-up textual BBSs), I clicked a random link
on Alta Vista or Yahoo and came to some page on John
Cowan's site; he had a link to Jeffrey Henning's Model
Languages page, and from one of their sites I also found
the CONLANG mailing list.  I joined the list for spring and
summer 1996, and unsubscribed when I got busy
with school again in the fall, then joined again intermittently
when not too busy in 1999, 2002, and 2004 to now (I think).

I had done some conlanging before 1996, but not very
seriously; it was discovering Jeffrey Henning's Model
Languages articles (the forerunner of Mark Rosenfelder's
Language Construction Kit), and the CONLANG list,
that got me seriously involved in conlanging.

> Consider this an open prompt; I just want to hear your stories about
> the social side of this craft.
You'll find more of them by looking in the archives for
people's responses to certain questions in Sally
Caves' "Lunatic Survey".  E.g. the thread starting here:

http://archives.conlang.info/jha/tuerwhe/wifhuzhoen.html

My own response is at
http://archives.conlang.info/jha/tuerwhe/pheldoelpuen.html


--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm