Re: history of conlanging (aka Conlang influences,aka Lest darkness fall)

This feels like I've walked into some 12-step plan, but here is a rough
aproximation of "my story":

The earliest conlanging project I remember doing was after (but not consciously
because of) reading Dune, LoTR and Thomas Covenant, and before I started RPGing.
I suppose I'd have been fourteen plus or minus a couple of year or so.  I'd
learned some Esperanto prior to that, and had read a book or three (the titles
and authors are lost in the mists of time) about the reconstruction of PIE.  The
language was "Goblin", and there were four phones, complete with script:

The script characters looked a bit like "<", "G", Capital Sigma and "X".  The
phones were (IIRC) Ingressive Uvular Click, Lateral Alveolar Affricate,
Pharyngeal Affricate and Velar Ejective, all voiced.  No vowels existed, though
there were minimal schwas if {<} and {X} followed eachother in either order.
Sentance structure was SVO, Head-last.  Words were formed on an ad-hoc basis
with lots of compounding and a kind of ablaut(?)-based/arabic-based thing for
words with similar meanings.  All notes on this lang are buried in an archive
box somewhere, but it didn't amount to much.

The next project was an auxlang, {polyparlisho}, based on euro roots taken
largely from Harraps 5-language dictionary, with some E-o stylistic influences.
As to word-choosing, for any given root, I consciously tried to give the word
from a language that didn't have a conflicting meaning in another language.  I
had copious notes, including (bizarrely) some conculturish stuff.  That too is
well and truly buried.  I think it died with my Amstrad 2086.

A few years passed with nothing too spectacular happening conlang-wise (beyond a
few five-minute tinkerings), and then I found the list at about the time as I
started reading about Elamite * and ... lo, another conlang was born, which has
thusfar spawned 3 sister langs and a conculture.

* In fact, my finding this list was due to my barging into sci.lang and asking
all kinds of wierd questions about a website that claimed the existence a
language family consisting of Sumerian, Elamite, Dravidian and Munda.  I've lost
the URL, but knowing now what I didn't know then, I'm sure these days I'd find
it an amusing read...


---
Pb



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