Re: history of conlanging

Tolkien was doubtless among my earliest influences.  I've
known about his essay "A Secret Vice" for as long as I can
remember, although I didn't succeed in tracking down a copy
until I was in junior high school.  Junior high is also when I
was first exposed to Esperanto, which I was initially quite
fascinated in.  Esperanto has never been a direct influence on
my conlanging.

I think my interest in constructed languages grew out of
the confluence of several streams:  In addition to Tolkien
and Esperanto, I was very much into codes and ciphers
as a kid, and also enjoyed drawing maps of imaginary places
(I even wrote an 80 page fantasy 'novel' when I was 9 or
10, heavily influenced by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis's Narnia
books.)  My first few attempts at conlanging were
successively more elaborate relexifications of English.
I remember inventing an "Elvish" language in connection
with the above-mentioned novel.  This consisted of
about two dozen words, a few of them completely a priori
(e.g. "lofen" = "plain, prairie"), but most of them barely
disguised corruptions of English (e.g. "yoo" = "you",
"shellip" = "ship", "lavetely" = "lately").

Later, when I was about 11, a friend and I collaborated on
an English relex which we called "Jibberish".  The vocabulary
for this one was completely a priori, but since there was no
attempt to establish a consistent phonology or phonotactics,
much less a grammar, it hardly deserves the name "conlang"
and should properly be called a "code".  We abandoned it
after inventing about 100 words, and never used it for
anything.

After a few more attempts, I finally succeeded in launching
a viable relex when I was about 13.  The name of this project
was "Messian" (later "Messyen", from "messi" = "speak").
Although it began as just an English relex - based on an
English word list which I adapted from a children's dictionary
- Messyen did have a consistent, non-English-based
phonology and quasi-consistent phonotactic rules.  It also
had a single non-English rule of grammar (modifying adjectives
follow the noun, as in French), and some morphology.  It
could thus perhaps be thought of as a 'proto-conlang'.

Later on, Messian/Messyen began to develop slowly into
a full-blown conlang, with a very different morphology and
word order from English (I seem to remember that it was
SOV, with prepositions, postnominal genitives & relative
clauses, preverbal embedded clauses, and no case-marking
on pronouns - a kind of mishmash of French and Japanese,
with a little Gaelic and Mandarin thrown in).  Aesthetically,
Messian/Messyen had what you might call an "Elvish-Celtic"
flavour:  Lots of liquid and nasal sounds, with an orthography
heavy on digraphs like "ae", "dh", "th", "hr", and "hw".
A couple example sentences:

        De-m  lu  awene'h
        1s-to  2s  Pres-love
        "I love you"

        E  radhwe'  in  iar      de   urile'
        the  dog     of  there  1s  Past-see
        "That dog saw me"

Here, tense was marked by prefixes, and <e'> = "e-accent".
When the subject and object were both pronouns, the preposition
"rim" was stuck in between them, and later contracted to "-m".
(I wonder if this would eventually have developed into an ergative
case-marking system?  I knew nothing about ergativity at the
time...)

I eventually abandoned Messyen when it became too unwieldy
and internally inconsistent.  After Messyen came "Tadhic" or
"Tagknoi" (later called "Tadheka"), which was my first attempt
to develop a conlang from scratch.  This language marked a
major departure from me, and includes influences from many
languages:  An Indonesian-meets-Russian phonology, VSO order,
isolating grammar, case marking, etc..

After a few years, I became bored with Tadheka and abandoned it
in favour of Kosan, which later developed through many tortuous
changes into Tokana.  And the rest, as they say, is history...

Matt.