Do you conlang?

A

Athelwulf

Rest in peace Kurt...
Registered Senior Member
Do any visitors to SciForums have one or more conlangs? If you do, tell us about it. Of those of you who don't, do you plan on making one, or at least have some interest?

I've been working on a Germanic conlang. I may have mentioned it here a few times. I've had the project for a long time, since before I came here; it inspired my username, in fact. But for the majority of that time it's been dormant.

For the uninitiated, a conlang is a constructed language, a language that someone sits down and creates, either from scratch or by basing it on a natlang (natural language). This is different from a cipher of English, where the words are modified like in Pig Latin or Ubby Dubby, or where a set of different vocabulary simply replaces English vocabulary and follows all the normal rules of English.
 
That's probably why girls do it in your presence. ;)

And no, not like girl talk, if you mean they just substitute English words with different words, or they just speak a slangy version of English.

What I'm talking about is, for example, a language with its own vocabulary, perhaps a complex case system similar to Russian, perhaps Chinese phonology, perhaps French word order... or perhaps none of the above and instead something totally different.
 
Because it's fun?

Because you can teach other people your conlang and maybe, just maybe, get a very large population of speakers, even native speakers, like what happened with Esperanto?
 
Athelwulf said:
Do any visitors to SciForums have one or more conlangs?

I've been working on a Germanic conlang.
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not really.
i've spoken some spolang, written some wrilang, and said some slanglang.
i've also been exposed to drelang, poslang, forlang, and yanglang.
i haven't quite mastered piglang, klilang, ferlang, or what'suplang.
 
Some girls I knew in highschool had a private language of sorts. More of a code, really.

They would spell out words and add "op" to all the consenents while pronouncing the vowels with the long sound. So dog would be pronounced "dop-o-gop". They could speak really quickly this way and would go back and forth in public getting quite a few stares.
 
madanthonywayne said:
Some girls I knew in highschool had a private language of sorts. More of a code, really.
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Sounds pretty interesting. And you're right that it's more of a code. As far as conlanging goes, this would be classified as a cipher of English rather than an actual conlang.

My sister knows some sort of code like you described, and I've met at least one other person who knew the same code. But I never learned it. I think you add "dig" or something to each syllable.
 
I speak Esperanto, learned it in 1957. I have a network of international correspondents and when I traveled in eastern Europe in 1973 I met many of them. Also met many others, in those days that was a region where you could run into Esperantists on the street. People in tiny countries who encounter a new language after driving for one afternoon understand the need for an international language. And although they had all been forced to learn German at gunpoint, for some strange reason they didn't feel like standardizing on that one.
 
Ursula Le Guin has a nice essay on the subject, from a writer's or layman's point of view rather than a linguist's, if you have the time.

There are more such people - language inventors - than a reasonable person would probably think off hand. Tolkein has been accused of writing his books - the entire Lord Of The Rings as well as several others - just to give his invented languages (his true interest) someone to speak them.
 
I wouldn't know why to invent another language, I have problems with just the one language that I was raised with! Even if I were to develop one who else would understand it? I'd have to teach everyone how everything sounded and what it ment. I'd say we already have enough languages in the world today to learn, why develop more?
 
I used to invent languages when I was a kid. Back in those days there wasn't any way to be exposed to foreign languages if you didn't happen to know somebody who spoke one. They didn't teach them in grade school like they do now. When I got to the seventh grade and they started teaching us Spanish, that was way more fun. I continued to do it for a few years until I had plenty of opportunities to study real ones.

One of the most fun experiences I had was stumbling onto the instruction sheet from a very old package of Bayer aspirin. It was trilingual, in English, Spanish and... well this weird language in an alphabet I'd never seen before. It was like a Rosetta Stone and I spent weeks deciphering it. First I identified the words "Bayer aspirin" and that helped me with the alphabet. Then things like "neuritis" and "neuralgia" (I told you this was ancient!) turned out to be phonetically transcribed from English. Then I found articles, prepositions and other little words that looked like some weird dialect of German. My parents would never have recognized it from the writing but when I told them of the German connection they realized it was Yiddish! I learned the Hebrew alphabet (sans vowels of course, Yiddish uses letters for vowels instead of diacriticals) and some of the basics of Yiddish, from an aspirin insert. It was years before I learned there was a Hebrew cursive alphabet for handwriting, I still block print my Hebrew letters.

That was much more fun and much more useful than making up a language of my own. :)
 
cosmictraveler said:
Even if I were to develop one who else would understand it? I'd have to teach everyone how everything sounded and what it ment.
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You just answered your question.

cosmictraveler said:
I'd say we already have enough languages in the world today to learn, why develop more?
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Because it's fun?

Fraggle Rocker said:
I learned the Hebrew alphabet (sans vowels of course, Yiddish uses letters for vowels instead of diacriticals) and some of the basics of Yiddish, from an aspirin insert.
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How did you do that? You must've had some reference point to start with, right?
 
Athelwulf said:
How did you do that? You must've had some reference point to start with, right?
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No. I was familiar with the Greek alphabet but had never seen the Hebrew alphabet and knew nothing about it. I didn't even know that alpha and beta were derived from aleph and beth. I was startled to realize that it was written from right to left. I just treated Yiddish writing as a code and worked to decode it. Since it's phonetic and I had some knowledge of German it was no feat of genius. I don't recall whether the aspirin instructions contained any vowel-less Hebrew words, which would have been very confusing.
 
I was working on one, but I stopped like 3 months ago because the oligosynthetic thing was starting to get hard and very frustrating.
 
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