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Re: tolkien?

From:Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>
Date:Thursday, December 11, 2003, 3:35
--- 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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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>