Re: Newbie says hi

En réponse à Mat McVeagh <matmcv@...>:

> Hi - name's Mat, I rediscovered conlangs about a week ago from Mark
> Rosenfelder's website (zompist.com) and have been amazed to find this
> huge
> Net community of conlangers.
Welcome Mat! (yeah, finally! But hey, I too have to sleep sometimes :)))) )
It's indeed a huge community. I was surprised myself when I discovered that 5
years ago.

 I say REdiscovered because I invented
> several
> languages in my early teenage years. I recorded it all in several
> exercise
> books, often among school work and BASIC programming plans.
LOL, reminds me of my early conlanging days, when I did that during Latin
classes (and I did say "during" ;)))) ).

 I drifted
> away
> from it after a few years and mostly forgot about it. Now, having read
> about
> all these amazing languages everybody's being creating, I have been
> inspired
> to get involved again.
Hehe, once the conlang bug has bit you, you can drift away from it for a while,
but you always end up back at it!

>
> Here is what I can find from my school-time notebooks:
>
> 1) Modified Esperanto, or an "Esperclone" as I now feel like calling
> this
> category. At first it seems not to have had a name, and only involved a
> few
> alterations to Zamenhof's 'masterpiece' (!), then as I began to
> experiment
> it drifted further away and took on independent names... #1 being
> "Langvaje"
> or "LaNvaje" (with the 'eng' symbol), then "Lingwajo". Hmmmm. I guess
> I
> wasn't always too original with names. I have just discovered I filled
> almost an entire exercise book with vocab and even a very neatly drawn
> handbook introduction, which is a lot further than I thought I'd got.
>
Reminds me of my early days. My first conlangs were imitations of Latin mainly.
I used also exercise books to write down about them, but I seem to have lost
them completely :((( .

> 2) "Anathusia", a very similar language, but having about 15 cases
> like
> Finnish, formed from neat agglutinated /VC/ suffixes.
>
Funny, a conlang of my second period (when I arrived in senior high
school :)) ) works exactly the same way! My Azak is also agglutinating, and has
only VC suffixes. But I managed to give it 22 cases ;))) . It has a strange
writing system too, where the roots are written with an alphabet but the
suffixes are written with a syllabary, with each sign corresponding to a VC
combination!

> 3) Unnamed, I referred to the various versions of it as "Language 5, 6,
> 7"
> etc. It was similar to the above two, but was basically just a means to
> play
> around with different ways of morphologically representing case,
> number,
> gender, verb tenses. There was an element of a loglang type of concern
> getting involved here.
>
I had lots of those in my early days too :)) . It seems you have quite the same
creative processes as I have :)) .

> In all three of the above the vocab was based on Esperanto and Latin
> and
> similar sources. The exercise was not in creating a workable language
> from
> the point of view of being able to speak it soon, with handy vocab,
> but
> rather workability in terms of grammatical structure and some
> phonological
> considerations etc.
>
I went very far with the same principle: at one time, I thought I found *the*
principle behind a successful auxlang: since all people have different phonetic
inventories, end everyone finds sounds more or less difficult to pronounce, the
best auxlang should have as few sounds as possible. It ended up with 4
consonants and four vowels! Of course, I had forgotten that for many people
it's not the sounds themselves but the syllable constraints that were
important, and to prevent too long words I allowed pretty heavy clusters...
Always count on me to forget half of what I'm doing ;))) .

> 4) "Ruman", probably the one I am going to have most fun reviving. It is
> a
> fictional Romance language, on the "what would have happened if there
> had
> been another country which developed an X type of language" principle,
> which
> I see many people have followed with their ficlangs. I imagined a
> small
> central European country called Talina that spoke Ruman, and that I
> was
> going to write a story about it (including interacting with other
> European
> countries and languages). Never got round to it of course... probably
> won't
> now, but it might be nice to revamp Ruman to a workable level on the
> Net,
> including some minor "pretend history" background. It was good with
> Ruman to
> get away from the common IAL obsession with regularity, and to have fun
> with
> artificial 'naturalistic' irregularity in imitation of French,
> Spanish,
> Italian etc. :) N.B. Ruman, being a fictional language, is not to be
> confused with any of the auxlang projects that involve reviving Latin
> or
> interrelating Romance languages (Interlingua, LSF etc.)
>
Funny, it looks quite like my Reman, also a fictional Romance language
(although I never even evolved a culture for them). When I first designed it, I
had also thought it could be spoken somewhere in Central Europe. But when I saw
how it developped, I realised that it would need complete isolation and I
scrapped that idea.

> 5) A Germanic equivalent to Ruman, don't think I ever named it, it
> didn't
> get much further than working out articles, adjective endings etc.
>
I don't remember ever trying a Germanic conlang. But then, I have a conlang out
there for which I have notes written obviously from my hand, and yet I still
can't remember when I did them! :))

> 6) "Tipikyero" - so-called because it was going to be a 'typical' East
> Asian
> language. There is no such thing of course; what I wanted was a break
> away
> from European styles of language towards a Malayo-Polynesian type like
> Indonesian, which I had been looking at at that time. It was to be on
> a
> fictional island somewhere near the Philippines. I think I was going
> to
> design a syllabary or something.
>
Funny that Indonesian seems to attract many conlangers. Maybe because it's the
most successful conlang of all times ;))) .

> That was then; besides that, I have had various ideas since which I
> have
> never committed to paper or text:
>
> 7) Similarly to Tipikyero, I have had a sense of a language very Sinitic
> in
> phonology and some aspects of syntax (extremely isolating, etc.) Again,
> the
> idea here was a story involving a new language - this one would be
> science
> fiction and set in the future.
>
I have a 'Dragon Language' which has the same features (except that it's spoken
nowadays ;)) ), but I never really worked on it. It was just an idea for a
story I never finished writing (and like anything I do, it's not dead. It's
just in prolonged sleep :)) ).

>
> 10) Similarly, on a grammatical level, I would like to design one that
> broke
> out of a few common constraints of both natural and artificial
> languages.
> Something that broke down the verb/noun/adjective etc. hegemony, or
> isolating/inflecting/agglutinative. How about this for a suggestion: a
> language that doesn't clearly have the categories "word", "phrase",
> "sentence". Instead it has other levels of grammatical scale and
> structure,
> which don't match up to those three. Imagine what that would do to the
> morphology/syntax division, or the three typological categories. I am
> very
> interested in Eskimo actually.
>
The language is called Inuktitut (or at least, the most prominent of those
languages is). The term 'Eskimo' is a bit insulting.

As for a language like you describe, there's always my Notya, my "neither-verb-
nor-noun" language :)) . It has all the features you describe. It doesn't even
have anything like particles or pre/postpositions. All the words belong to the
same category. Even inflections are very few: 2 suffixes which can appear in
two different states, thus making four suffixes and that's all. 3 rules of
grammar are enough to explain all the grammar there is. The rest is purely
lexical :)) .

> That's all I can think of at the mo, except that of course in my early
> days
> I also did other things like devise alternative spelling systems for
> English. I apparently came up with one for Latin too, and even made
> Latin
> regular again. I have none of this on the web, so I will have to begin
> a
> website for it. It will take AGES to copy some of that data out of my
> notebooks, and I don't know how much I can be bothered. But I'd like to
> get
> some picture of them all up so people can see for themselves.
>
You can always begin by presenting some of your work on the list! We're always
hungry for reading about new conlangs :))) . I'm especially interested about
your Ruman. I wonder how near or far from my Reman it is ;)) . If you want to
see about a few languages of mine, you can look at my webpage (URL at the
bottom of this post). It is only in French, but the conlang pages are simple
enough. I currently have only Reman, Azak and Moten on the web. All my other
languages (like Notya) have been extensively discussed on the list though, so
you can search through the archives for them. Use this address:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/conlang.html, it's much better than the
Yahoo archive and much more complete.

> I think I am going to enjoy being on this list, :)
>
Be sure of it! :))

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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