INTRODUCTION
Constructed
Language #4892
Release Notes,
2001-04-30
This being the first significant addition to my pages for a
year or so, I rushed it out a bit early; but I think it's had
all the major bugs shaken out now, so I'll call this its
official release and get on with some maintenance work
elsewhere... any further tweaks in this directory will be
documented as usual on my changelog
page.
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First I'd better explain what a conlang (or
"constructed language") is. It's obvious, really,
as long as you don't imagine I'm talking about anything as
mundanely utilitarian as the development of computer
"languages" like Intercal, or language-planning
projects like the one that brought Hebrew back from the
dead. Some conlangs are indeed contenders for the role of
International Auxiliary Language, or Philosophically Perfect
Logical Language; but most are just the fictional languages of
fictional societies. JRR Tolkien, patron saint of
conlangers, described it as his "Secret Vice"...
though that was before he came out of the closet and found a way
of turning a tidy profit on the hobby. I await with
interest the Peter Jackson big-screen adaptation of
Appendix F.
Once that's been explained, the next question is usually
"why?" - and the answer tends to be "as an
expression of an obscurely specialised creative urge", or
"as a Gedankenexperiment in linguistic typology", or
perhaps once the thumbscrews come out "because I had more
imaginary than real friends to talk to". However,
I've got an excuse handy: of all the toy languages I've sketched
out over the years, this is the only one I've built to
order! A friend offered to pay me a few quid (or was it
pints?) if I'd give him a language suitable for use as background
colour in a roleplaying campaign he ran; I didn't get any further
details, so I just put a week or so's free time into creating
something that felt like an adequate compromise avoiding...
- Overfamiliarity
I wanted it to look like a plausible natural language, not a
Loglan, but that didn't mean it had to be some thinly disguised
version of Latin or Welsh! The fictional setting wasn't
Europe, so my imagined language wasn't mock-European.
- Difficulty
This was a hopeless cause (my client wasn't even a polyglot, let
alone a linguist) but I did my best to keep things manageable by
making the inflectional system small and regular, avoiding
seriously exotic sounds, and cutting corners here and
there.
- Cultural specificity
Since I didn't have any idea whether the language needed words
for "kangaroo" or "flintlock" I tried to
reduce it to a lowest common denominator. I didn't even
take the step of naming my brainchild - it just received a
tongue-in-cheek serial number. The contrast with the
stereotypical in-depth approach just made it more fun!
I should emphasise that I don't seriously expect people to
want to learn the language; it's just here as a curiosity, though
I suppose other RPGers might find it a handy source of
just-add-water glossolalia. Nor is it "my ideal
language" - it just happens to be particularly
thoroughly documented, and thus easy to HTMLise. I may
continue to reorganise and expand on the documentation, but it
went into a "feature freeze" years ago.
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