Re: fictional worlds

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 06:54:12 +0200, Irina Rempt <irina@...> wrote:

>On Wednesday 11 September 2002 05:36, Santiago wrote:
>
>> From: Irina Rempt <irina@...>
>> > On Friday 09 August 2002 05:54, Herman Miller wrote:
>> >
>> > What is your question, what kind of culture you should
>> > make? You are the only person who can decide that, unless you're
>> > doing it on demand (you *do* make languages for money, don't you?).
>>
>>  I do not do languages for money and I don't know anyone who does
>> it...
>
>I know someone who I think makes languages for money (and so do you):
>Herman Miller, who was the person I responded to. I don't have the
>original message any more, but if it was you and not him asking the
>question his mailreader did something strange to the attributions.
>
>   Irina
I didn't write the original question, either. It was a technical problem
when I was briefly trying to use Outlook to reply to the group (in order to
try out Cloudmark SpamNet), but I've gone back to using Agent. Fortunately,
IOCOM has now started using Spam Assassin, which seems to be working much
better than Cloudmark was anyway. (Moesteskin isn't my language; my part of
the reply begins with "Well, some of my languages are spoken by humans...."
and goes on to talk about Olaetian. Sorry for the confusion.)

I once designed a language that was used in a game (Ultima VI), but I
didn't get paid specifically for the language. I was a programmer at Origin
at the time, and I did most of the Gargoyle language and translations in my
spare time (with some feedback from Richard Garriott and John Miles along
the way). I also wrote the original version of the web page describing the
Gargoyle language (http://www.uo.com/archive/gargoyle/), and designed the
Ultima font which includes the Gargish alphabet (available from the same
web page). For those dedicated players who completed the game and contacted
Origin, I signed the name of King Draxinusom in the Gargish alphabet on
their certificates.

The history of the Gargoyle alphabet is interesting: I'd been doing
"phonetic feature" alphabets like that before, since reading about Tengwar,
Visible Speech, and others, but it was actually Richard who came up with
the initial idea for the alphabet. He didn't know anything about phonetics,
and explained his idea in non-technical terms, but of course I could see
where he was going with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if he also got the
idea from Tolkien. I recently ran across some earlier versions of the
alphabet, and they really are quite different from the final result.

--
languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>---
hmiller (Herman Miller)   "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
@io.com  email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
\ "Subject: teamouse" /  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin