--- Balazs Sudar wrote:

> Do you have any created cultures? I saw you wrote about calendars, but have
> you invented creatures, history, places?

No creatures! Everything I make, is located on Earth, not even in the most
exotic places you can imagine.
When I was a teenager, I liked to play with the idea of a fictional island in
the Atlantic Ocean. Originally it was located somewhere between Norway and
Island, but later it shifted to a place that would have formed the Western
point of a triange with Ireland and Spain. There were seven states with
different political systems, and a few more nationalities. Strange enough I
think I never got the idea of giving a name to the island as a whole.
All this originated from several of my hobbies: languages, drawing maps,
politics, history...
What would be nicer for a cartographer to draw his own maps?
What would be nicer for a historian to invent his own history?
Etc.
I would be difficult to call this a real conculture. It was not much more than
a lot of maps (including historical maps), some drawings, and a few language
sketches. Instead of going deeper and deeper into details, I had the bad habit
of drawing the same thing over and over again. I abolished the whole thing when
I was about nineteen.
Quite recently I discovered some sketches I had completely forgotten about of a
separate Indo-European language family connected with that island.

About my current projects I can say more or less the same. I don't know what
came first: the languages or the maps. I guess they came together. The
difference is, that now the languages are the only thing that really matter to
me. Thus, the Hattic ASSR and the Vozgian ASSR are not much more than a map and
five languages. Almost no history, no characters, no calendar... Only when I
started writing an introduction about the Hattic language, and I had to fill up
the "Land and people" section, I began thinking about a conculture. Doing that,
I discovered the fun of writing something that might fool the innocent reader.
You can see it here: http://steen.free.fr/hattic.htm#introduction.
I must add here, that there is nothing that particularly distinguishes the
Vozgians or the Hats from, say, the Latvians or the Udmurts. It's just that
when writing my thesis about Ukraine, I felt somehow irritated that everything
had already happened and I had no influence at all on the subject itself.

To answer your question: yes, there is some sort of conculture involved, but
it's really nothing more than just a vehicle for the language.

> And how have you invented names? Do you take all possible words and choose
> the ones you like? I don't think so ;-) If there's someone who prefers taking
> from other sources, what are they?

Sure. Mostly geographical names, and a few persons. I tried to make them as
natural as possible. Some names are derived from words, in the same way as
natlangs do, other names I just made up in a way that would fit nicely with the
language.

Regards,
Jan

=====
"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." --- J. Michael Straczynski

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