Re: tolkien?

Hey.

It's fun to reflect on our roots, as it were. I am of the camp which
was inspired by Tolkien, and my first serious attempt at a constructed
language was obviously modelled on Quenya and Finnish. It didn't last
very long. Later attempts were to draw on my interest in native
languages of the Americas and Semitic; the endpoint of this development
is Miapimoquitch, my current project (which I've been neglecting, to my
shame).

I am intrigued by writing systems as well, but the fictional history of
Miapimoquitch does not include an indigenous writing system (though it
does include the Deseret Alphabet). Maybe my next project ...

Dirk

On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 12:11  PM, Gary Shannon wrote:

> My conlonging had its beginnings long before I heard
> of Tolkien, when I was around nine or ten (early
> 1950's).  I loved to listen to shortwave radio and
> couldn't get enough of listening to languages I
> couldn't understand just to enjoy the sound of them.
>
> My first conlang was what, at age 10, I thought was
> the brilliant inovation of assigning a basic meaning
> to each letter and creating words by stringing
> together letters whose meaning describe the meaning of
> the desired word.
>
> At the more mature age of 11 I created Igpaya
> Ussianruskie (Pig Russian) which worked just like Pig
> Latin except that there were a number of substitutes
> for PL's "ay" depending on which consonant or vowel
> came before it. ("aya", "uskie", "ova", icha", etc.)
>
> In the 60's came my first pictographic conlang, and
> maybe a dozen bits and pieces of incomplete languages
> have followed.
>
>
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"No theory can exclude everything that is wrong, poor, or even
detestable, or
include everything that is right, good, or beautiful."    - Arnold
Schoenberg

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