Hallo conlangers!

On 05/02/2018 02:57, Walter Sperat wrote:

> Hey everyone!
> Due to a recent thread on which several people listed their ages, and
> having recently watched Conlanging: The Art of crafting Tongues, I got
> curious about the individual stories of the people on this list, i.e. how
> did you get into conlanging?

I have always been fascinated by systems in which small things combine
into something bigger: LEGO, letters, numbers, chemical formulas - that
sort of stuff. And when I was ten years old (that was in 1980), my older
brother started learning Latin in school, and the curious kid I was, I
leafed through his Latin grammar and saw all those wonderful
inflectional paradigms. That was the spark which lighted the "conlanging
fire" in me!

My first conlang was an attempt at an IAL, which never flew far (see
http://www.frathwiki.com/Homu). Later, I made conlangs for some
fictional worlds I created, especially after encountering Quenya and
Sindarin in Tolkien's writings. After all, foreigners speak foreign
languages, so why shouldn't fictional nations speak fictional languages?
Little survives of these conlangs, and they worked basically just like
German (my L1) and Latin.

But what really got the ball rolling was an oddball Tolkien fan fiction
story featuring Elves in the world of today
(http://www.alt-tolkien.com/r13home11.html). I wondered, what kind of
language would those Elves speak? That was early in the year 2000. I
decided to build that language myself! Obviously, it would be a
descendant of Sindarin, hence I began to peruse Internet sources on
Tolkien's languages, and also found the late, lamented Langmaker conlang
database and the CONLANG list which I joined. And so "Nur-ellen" began
to take shape. The old-timers on this list perhaps still remember it.

But I got carried away. The Elves began to mutate, from Tolkienian Elves
to a human ethnic group who share some cultural traits with Tolkien's
people, and whom I imagined to be the grain of truth in Germanic and
Celtic traditions of Elves, as well as the Greek tales of Hyperborea,
the Phaeacians and Atlantis. Nur-ellen was briefly considered for
inclusion in Ill Bethisad at this point, but it was soon revised out of
it again because I had disagreements with some other members about the
direction of the project.

Then, I took a brief detour, as Andrew Smith's Brithenig (Latin with
Welsh sound changes) and Geoff Eddy's Breathanach (Latin with Irish
sound changes) inspired me to build a Latin with German sound changes,
originally also intended for Ill Bethisad: Germanech. This was done
quite quickly and gave me a language ready to use in translation relays
and such. After my departure from Ill Bethisad, Germanech ceased to be a
part of it, and soon after, I pretty much abandoned it (after changing
the name to "Roman Germanech": http://www.frathwiki.com/Roman_Germanech).

But Germanech had taught me how to properly work diachronically. I
realized that Nur-ellen was in this sense done not very well. Also,
after my Elves had ceased to have to do anything with Tolkien's, I
decided it was time to sever the link to Tolkien's languages. So I
scrapped Nur-ellen and started from scratch.

At this point, the conlanging interest spawned a second linguistic hobby
in me: historical linguistics. And I found that two former Soviet
scholars, Tamaz Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov, had written a book in
which they proposed some novel ideas about Proto-Indo-European:
_Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans_. And a library in the city where
I live carried it! So I checked it out, and found an interesting idea
therein: PIE may once have been an active-stative language, like what I
had in mind for my Elven languages. I decided that the Elven languages
were related to IE, branching off at that early stage.

So the Albic project (http://www.frathwiki.com/Albic) was born. Today,
the classical language of the old Elven civilization, Old Albic, has
grown a lot, I can already compose texts in it, though I am still far
from being fluent, and the vocabulary needs being laid down in an
ordered dictionary. At the same time, I am working on Old Albic's
ancestor, Proto-Albic, and that one's ancestor, Proto-Hesperic, which is
a sister of PIE.

And right now, yet another lost language family of Europe is beginning
to take shape: Tommian, to which the Razaric languages belong. Tommian
will be related to Kartvelian in a similar way as Hesperic is to IE, and
Razaric is the language of a people who are to Dwarves what the Albic
speakers are to Elves.

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