Re: tolkien?

>On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 18:12:36 -0500 (EST) "<Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier>"
<SMITHV637@...> wrote.
>i was wondering who many of you were in spired by tolkien? thats why i
>started all this in the first place. and if you werent inspired by tolkien
who or
>what made you start?
>
I was fascinated by languages from an early age. Aged about ten (maybe), I
started my own reconstruction of "Common", which was basically PIE (more a
Romance / Germanic hybrid, with hindsight) before I knew about PIE, or
indeed any significant chunk of linguistics. I used a number of travellers
phrasebooks. There was no grammar to speak of.

My first real conlang came after reading The Loom Of Language
http://www.amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/039330034X and a small amount of a text
on Esperanto. It was called Polyparlisho. It was largely an English
relexification, and you couldn't do much more than produce present
indicative sentences about ducks, but it was my baby. I still have the notes
on my PC, possibly the longest-lived data file in my possession.

I did enjoy Tolkien, somewhat, and enjoyed reading his Appendical
(?)information on his languages, but at the time, it didn't inspire me to
try it for myself.

I was more inspired by the languages of Dune than Middle Earth, to be
honest, but then I read those books at an older age.

I had a number of other projects after that. G<< used guttural sounds,
including what these days I might call a glottal trill. I can't describe how
to make the sound, but it sounds like a trill of clicking noises produced
very far back in the throat, without using the tongue G<< was the first
con-script I invented. It was kinda conceived as an Ork language, but I have
no idea of the ecology of the Orks in question.

For a high school creative writing class, I made a fictional account of the
decipherment of a con-script, with examples. It was typically heirglyphic,
i.e. a rebus script.

Time passed. Other projects came and went. I started learning some actual
linguistics.

Then came Wenetaic. This was a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous
thing. There were very many derivational operations, but they all resulted
in forms that had to be lexically learned. The roots were produced on an
ad-hoc basis, modelled loosely after a general European mold. One thing that
stuck with me is the use of Semantic rather than Syntactic gender, which
came from Elamite, and is continued into Thagojian.

Then came Thagojian (type A), which was a behemoth. The least said about
this consonant-rich monstrosity, the better. It evolved in leaps and
slithers into what I know today as Thagojian, which is far less behemothic,
and almost an actual workable language, with real sound-change rules, and
everything.

And that, as they say, is that,




Paul

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