IntroductionThanks for the welcome to Conlang. I am very glad I was told about i

Thanks for the welcome to Conlang. I am very glad I was told about it at
Kalamazoo.
I have to say, I may not be able to stay on if it goes into another huge
batch of off-topic discussion--it literally took me hours to wade through it, the
first few days I was on.
I am now ruthlessly deleting all offtopic messages without reading them--many
are interesting in themselves, but I just don't have time to deal with them:
I am on several other lists; before joining conlang it took up to an hour a
day to keep up--reading all conlang messages doubled that). Fortunately, the
proportion of relevant material has increased since the survey and I hope it will
stay that way.
About myself and my conlangs: I am 53 years old, and began creating my first
major conlang in 1962 when I was12. (Sara in her paper at Kalamazoo noted many
begin conlangs about that age).That language was Natece Atechana (Sacred
Language) ; it was supposed to be the deliberately invented sacred language of a
conworld. The earliest texts were very limited chants (on the order of Aum Mane
Padme Hum with less profound meaning) but I developed the language by
translating the Book of Genesis and some shorter Bible passages into it (as many
natlangs developed their literary form from Bible translation). (This was
supposedly done by Episcopalian missionaries, the Order of St.Clive (C.S.Lewis)). It
was a crude language with many obvious borrowings from English, Latin and
German (the natlangs I knew at the time).Natece eventually became a "dead" language
in that I was no longer developing that conworld, though the language became
a sacred/magical language in another conworld, chiefly developed for solo D&D,
called the World of the Intercosmic Collapse (WIC for short) which I began in
1976. In that world there are theoretically several conlangs, but the only
one developed significantly so far is Meridonian, a Romance conlang derived from
Latin by a regular set of sound (and spelling) changes; at least, High Court
Meridonian is supposed to be regular, though Low Meridonian consists of any
Romance word I happen to think of when I need it, run through the sound/spelling
changes. It occupies a cultural position in that world roughly that of French
in our world's high middle ages. It has never been as systematically worked
out as Natece or my recent inventions.  After many years in which I did only
slight casual conlanging, a few years ago I had another major burst, in which
the principal developed conlang is Rihana-ye  varoha (Coldland-of speech)(more
properly Rihana-ye fivaroha, Coldland-of language). I have written quite a few
texts,mostly fairly short, in this language, and some of them I typed and
circulated in Elanor, an APA loosely associated with the Mythopoeic Society.
Apparently I cannot attach them to mailings to this list (I tried and it bounced)
but I couldsend them individually to anyone interested. My custom is to
actually compose the text first in Rihana-ye, then do an extremely literal English
translation.  This language is influenced by Korean and Japanese, which I was
studying at the time (I taught in Korea 1987-88), though I have to say
underlying English influences slip through. There are several other conlangs in various
staging of development  in that conworld (Their Rihana-ye names--by which I
usually call them-- include Hemana-ye, Pihana-ye, Zatona-ye, Pizatona-ye,
Zanona-ye). I did a lot of work in that conworld for a few years, but then it began
to get too complex (especially with trying to develop the other conlangs and
concultures), so of late I had been devoting more time to the WIC, which is
less demanding (as most WIC records are kept unashamedly in English). I hope now
with the inspiration of the Conlang
list audience to go back and develop Rihana-ye and the other langs of
thatconworld more.
John Leland

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