Re: tolkien?

--- Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier skrzypszy:

> i was wondering who many of you were in spired by tolkien? thats why i
> started all this in the first place.
Not me. In fact, I had already quite some experience conlanging before I
found out that Tolkien was involved in it, too.

> and if you werent inspired by tolkien who or what made you start?
That's hard to say. I guess it started as a combination of general interest
in languages (expressed by the fact that as soon as I could read I started
collecting tourist's phrasebooks), and a need for being creative. So, I
remember inventing "new" words during my primary school years, but no real
conlanging.

When I went to secondary school, I quickly learnt that both Latin and
French had impressive conjugational tables, and so I started gathering the
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc., and subsequently creating my own.

A few years later, at 14 or so, I toyed with a fictional island in the
Atlantic, where numerous languages were spoken (including Pictish, Gothic,
a Romance language called "Allic", and no less than six fictional Indo-
European languages).

My first "serious" attempts at conlanging were in 1996, at 26, when I
started two languages families more or less simultaneously, both for a
fictional Soviet republic, with the idea of writing a political story. The
story was of course never written, but the languages still exist:

Vozgian was (and is) a North-Slavic language. Inspiration? Probably the
fact that we only have East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic, and so I
wanted to fill the gap. Currently, I am redoing Vozgian from the beginning.
Vozgian also had two quite unoriginal sister languages, but they didn't
make it after all.

Hattic and Askaic both belong to a separate branch of Indo-European
languages. Mostly inspired by Tocharian. Currently dormant.

Wenedyk was started in August 2002, inspired by languages as Brithenig.

So, as you can see, no Tolkien here!

Jan

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