Re: tolkien?

Someone 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 first started conlanging at the age of about 10, several years before
I read anything of Tolkien's.  I don't remember exactly what made me
start, but I suspect it was a book I used to pore over endlessly called
"Codes, Ciphers and Secret Languages".  My first conlang was designed
to be a secret language for use with my best friend; it had a phonology
inspired by Japanese, since I was quite fascinated by Japan at the
time.

Tolkien was almost certainly an contributing factor in my
world-building and conlanging in the years after I read the Lord of the
Rings at about the age of 13.

(Side anecdote: at the age of 10 or so, when my younger brother was a
year or two old, I conducted a linguistic experiment on him:  I
invented two phrases, [kEt o] and [j&t diZeI], meaning "sit down" and
"stand up" (I'm not sure anymore which was which), and tried to see if
I could teach him to respond to them without explaining them.  It
worked.)

Estel

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