On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Daniel Bowman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This year is special.  It marks the halfway point in my life-half of my life
> has been spent as a conlanger, and half has not.

I passed that point six years ago, I think.

> Thirteen years ago, I inscribed the sentence "aria zkio algialtha" on a
> paper, probably while sitting in 7th grade math class.

Cool.  gjâ-zym-byn is about thirteen and a half; I started working on
it in late February or early March 1998, probably during Spring break.
 I'd done some work on other conlangs while sitting in class, but I
don't think I did much on gzb in class; my last semester of college
was the most stressful of the lot, and I don't think I worked much
more on the language (after the first intense few weeks) until late
summer.

> Thirteen years later, I've got over 1400 words, a corpus with over 200 pages

That's pretty impressive.  I don't know how large my gzb corpus is --
it's hard to measure, being spread out over so many notebooks and
interleaved with text in English and Esperanto -- but it's probably in
the mid-hundreds or low-thousands of pages.  I have about 27 notebooks
with at least some gzb text in them; I'm not sure how to estimate the
average number of pages of gzb text -- only one is entirely in gzb,
and several have only a few gzb pages and are mostly in English or
Esperanto; I'd guess the average number of gzb pages is between 10 and
50.  Plus a lot of ephemera like to-do lists and grocery lists,
Christmas cards, and a handful of texts composed directly in a text
editor.  (The electronic corpus, which overlaps with the paper corpus,
is just shy of 23,000 words.)

> probably hundreds of
> hours spent building a language that does not exist.

Sure it exists!  "Everything is real, the question is, a real what?"

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/