Re: tolkien?

On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 01:56 PM, paul-bennett wrote:

>> 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),
Yep, I was fascinated by language as soon as I realized not everyone spoke
English, and my first conlang came along when I was about 9 or 10.  It was
a result partly of discovering the English derived from Old English (or
Anglo-Saxon, as it tended to be called in those far off days) and old
French
texts books of my mother's (where I discovered the subjunctive mood  :)

> 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.
Mine had tons of grammar - at least the verbs did: all the tenses and moods
of French  :)

But this was was some nine years before I knew about Tolkien - so, no
influence,
I'm afraid.

The next impetus was finding a book about Esperanto when I was 11. I was
fascinated
to find that someone else other than me had invented a language, and that
there
might be a purpose in creating one. So from then through my teens I
produced at least
one IAL a years, sometimes two or three - now all lost.  They gradually
moved away
from the Esperantine model and were usually influenced by whatever natlang
I was
currently trying to get to grips with  :)

During this time at least one real artlang was produced, largely
influenced by Finnish
& Turkish and spoken somewhere on Venus.

> My first real conlang came after reading The Loom Of Language
Yes, I'd got hold of the Loom of Language when I was about 12 - facinating
stuff.
The main affect of it was for me to get my grandparents to give me "Novial
Lexike" for Christmas in 1953   :)

> 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.
Same here - I enjoyed, and still enjoy, his books and the appendices to
LotR -
but they didn't inspire me to try for myself.  I'd been conlanging too long
to need any impetus to do so.

And (if you don't know it already, you can read about it on my web-site) I'
d
got involved in the briefscript/ BrSc project, which really must be
completed
a.s.a.p.  Perhaps when (and if) I can get this out of my system, I can move
onto other things.

Ray
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