Hallo conlangers!

On Sunday 31 July 2011 23:14:55, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier 
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> > [Tokana & Miapimoquitch]
> > Indeed, the concultures of both languages are extremely sketchy.
> > They are just spoken "somewhere".
> 
> I can't speak for Tokana, but Tepa/Miapimoquitch was spoken in a very
> specific somewhere (Glenn Canyon, Utah) by a very specific group of people
> (Ancestral Puebloans (=Anasazi)) whose culture we know something about (at
> least to the extent that archaeologists can know about any culture in the
> absence of written records, which is actually very little). The language
> (and its speakers) disappeared sometime in the first half of the 19th
> century.

Oh sorry, I wasn't aware of that.  So M. is pretty much like
Old Albic, except that the culture for which it is meant is
much better known (about pre-Celtic Britain, where Old Albic
is meant to be spoken, we know little more than that there
were people there who knew farming and bronze).  This makes
Miapimoquitch a prime candidate for the League of Lost
Languages ( http://www.frathwiki.com/League_of_Lost_Languages ).
You are hereby invited to join.

The grammar of Tokana says a bit about its conculture, but is
not very specific; to me, at least, it conjures a rather blurry
image of a people living somewhere along the Pacific coast of
Canada.  (The grammar I refer to here is the one found at 
http://mpearson.narod.ru/tok.toc.html - which, AFAIK, is no
longer up to date.  Matt may have revised his ideas on the
conculture since then.)
 
> In creating the language, I was more interested in putting together some
> nifty linguistic thingies into a language than I was in inventing a
> culture, but I also feel that a language ought to be rooted somehow in a
> community of speakers, and that's why I created the backstory of a
> non-native speaker as the source of information about the language; that
> way, I get out of having to say more about that other stuff.

I agree with you.  A language always reflects the world-view
of its speakers, at least in the vocabulary (whether the
world-view has influences on the grammar is less certain);
so a fictional language cannot be produced without a more
or less specific image of its speaker community in mind.
It may be an overstatement, but it has been said that Tolkien
created Middle-earth to have a place where his conlangs could
be spoken.  What regards Old Albic, the conculture behind it
not only serves as a backdrop for the language, but also as
a reflection of my personal feelings about the human condition.
 
> I am thinking a lot about the culture of three different language I'm
> currently making. (Okay, two of these are works-for-hire, and much of the
> culture construction has been done for me, but I'm contributing my own
> touches. The third is entirely mine, and I've been giving a lot of thought
> to climate, terrain, social organization, etc.) But linguistic invention is
> what really floats my boat, as one of my former professors would say.

It is similar to me.  I am especially interested in languages,
though I am generally interested in worldbuilding as well,
and my interest in languages developed from the interest in
worldbuilding, combined with a general fascination with all
sorts of symbols.

On Monday, 1 August 2011 15:04:33, Matthew Martin wrote:

> > And I think there are not too few conlang fans who actually
> > try to learn conlangs they are interested in.
> 
> I've seen the number bandied about that there are about 50 to 100
> serious conlang fans world wide.

Even if I take this as "serious artlang fans" (I can number at
least seven auxlangs and engelangs which have more followers),
I consider this a gross underestimate, though I think not many
conlangs are seriously being studied and learned by any people
other than the author.

>       Right after a major movie or a series of major movies
> or a TV show, there can be up to a few million fans, even if a
> percent of those are hard core fans, that still a lot of fans,
> a number that dwarfs the number of conlang fans, and if there
> is a language available to learn, then even if a tiny sliver
> of the hard core fans happen to have the talent to learn the
> language, the resulting number of competent users of a fandom
> conlang will dwarf the total number of non-fandom conlangers.

Certainly so.  Klingon, Na'vi and the languages of Middle-earth
are so hugely popular not because of "cool" linguistic features;
they are so hugely popular because they belong to hugely popular
fictional universes.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1