Hallo conlangers!

On Wednesday 13 July 2011 17:45:47, Adam Walker wrote:

> My drive to conlang is intimately connected, yet seperate from, my desire
> to write (which reminds me, I have to follow up on a poem that was
> "accepted").  I am a passionate fan of SF, especially SF that includes, or
> better focuses on, aliens.  When I write about aliens, I want them to have
> languages that are more than just throwawy decoration.  Many of my conlangs
> are connected to various writing projects.  Others are stand-alone projects
> that have no fictional setting attched.

I have been dabbling with fictional worlds since I was about
ten or so (I am 41 now), often together with a cousin.  I am
also an SF fan, but I find alien beings difficult to write
about.  At the moment, I am focussing on two world building
projects, none of which features non-human races.  One is the
legendarium of the "Elves" who speak my main conlang, Old
Albic; the other is a near-future world which does not feature
any conlangs, only a handful of neologisms.  I do have some
vague plan for a farther future which features (non-humanoid)
aliens, but it is so far just a cloud of ideas.

Old Albic has a long history, during which it drifted away
quite a bit from the original idea.  In the spring of the
year 2000, I found a Middle-earth fan fiction story on the
Net which featured Elves in a modern setting.  I wondered
what kind of language those Elves would speak, and began
drafting a descendant of Sindarin - in hindsight, I made
a horrible mess of it.  A few months later, I came to the
conclusion that "Elves" that are ordinary mortal humans
would work just as well (and considered adding them to
Ill Bethisad, but that turned out to be ill-advised, and
the "Elves" were fiated out again).

Having it thus divorced from Tolkien's legendarium, I felt
that the language should no longer be based on Tolkien's
languages, and I decided to start from scratch.  Another
reason for starting from scratch was that that way, I could
really do what I wanted in my conlang.  So the Albic project
was born (first under the working title "Q", which originally
stood for "Quendian", but later for nothing in particular).

The Albic project is a highly sophisticated matter which
involves research into the actual languages of prehistoric
Europe in general and prehistoric Britain in particular.
Of course, very little is known on those languages, but I
try finding out as much as possible about them, compiling
lists of possible substratum loanwords in Germanic and
Celtic languages from etymological dictionaries, analysing
old geographic names and all that fuzz.

Why am I doing all that stuff?  I do that because it is fun,
and it is a great way to express myself and my views on the
world and the human condition.  Of course, Old Albic is not
a reconstruction with a claim on truth in a scholarly sense;
it is rather a "re-creation" of something that *could have
been*, and speaks a spiritual truth of a very personal kind.
It is almost a religious experience.
 
> And then there is Carrajina, which has taken on a life I never anticipated.
> It started out as a what-if, inspired by Wenedyk, Kerno and Brithenig.  I
> had sort of looked down on Romlangs as too derivative, sort of "not really
> conlangs" -- at least not in the same way that my exolangs were.  But then
> I got intrigued by what Jan, Padraic and Andrew were doing and started
> taking a closer look at what others were doing with langs like Germanech
> and Narbonsc and Judaica.

Germanech, my romlang, was inspired by Brithenig, and once
considered as a part of Ill Bethisad, but disagreements with
some people involved caused me to withdraw from that project,
and Germanech later became a part of the League of Lost Languages,
but the language has definitely lost momentum (much unlike
Carrajina!), to the point that I feel that the language just
needs to get "finished" and then abandoned.  (No, I won't throw
it away; I just want to round it out and then leave it as it is.)

> I staked out North Africa simply because it was
> a previously Latin-speaking part of the world no one else had yet
> explored; I had no special attachment to the region.  Then I strated
> digging into the history of the area for historical justifications for the
> language, and likely sources of borrowings, and from that a decade long
> obcession grew that now includes a growing protion of the Bible in
> translation, several original works of fiction, songs on cd, recipes that
> form an important part of my diet, greeting cards, art work, a detailed
> history of over 1000 years, a library of books on the histories, cultures
> and cuisines of the region, dance forms, music, and the hope that some day
> a novel will emerge from all this to tell the whole history of this
> fascinating (to me at least!) country and her people.

This is indeed quite similar to what I am in with my Elves.
Those people have become my "people of my heart", and I am
exploring many facets of that culture, and intend to explore
yet more in the future.  Currently, though, I am focussing on
the Classical Old Albic language.  (See above.)
 
> I started conlanging while my mother was in the hospital before the birth
> of my youngest brother almost three decades ago due to frustration with
> not having the opportunity to really learn any of the "cool" languages --
> like Russian or Swedish or Chinese, and the idea just grew from there with
> slow progress on a couple of languages until the Internet arrived in my
> life and I found the tlhIngan-Hol mailing list where I indulged that
> pleasure to the point of going to on o their summer camps.  It was there
> that someone pointed me to this list.  I've been at home here ever since,
> even though there have been a few no-mail periods (one of which mercifully
> coincided with the AuxLang split!).

I discovered CONLANG when I searched for useful resources for
what was back then the "Modern Elvish" project, and joined the
list in mid-2000.  I had started conlanging much earlier, my
first attempt (an auxlang!) was some time in the early 80s,
and it never went beyond a few basic ideas.  My first "real"
conlang - a fictional language for a space opera world involving
a paleocivilization - I devleoped in the late 80s.  It was
pretty much a relex of Latin, and the world (and with it the
language) has been scrapped soon later.  I did not conlang
much in the 90s, only invented some names for various fictional
worlds I experimented with during that decade.

> Okay, back to what I should be doing.
> 
> Adam

--
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http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
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