Monday, June 13, 2005

Let the Finder Beware: A Language of My Own

Let the Finder Beware's blog writer Paul says:

"When I was 13 years old, in eighth grade, I started constructing my own language. We're not talking a short word list or a few limited pieces of jargon, we're talking an entire functioning language. With its own grammar, its own vocabulary, its own idioms, and its own meanings which are often hard to translate into English. I kept on working on this language for years. I'm still working on it today, 35 years later."

I've never heard of this type of thing before, but Paul found out years later that there are others like him:

"...until just over two years ago, I thought that we language-makers must be an exceedingly rare and almost unheard-of phenomenon. Then I stumbled across the website of Sally Caves, an English professor who had begun creating her own language, Teonaht, when she was only nine years old. And through her site I found all sorts of other sites of people who had their own 'constructed languages' or 'conlangs'."

To read more about Paul's created language, click on the title of this post.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The Lord of the Rings pretty much owes its origin to the languages Tolkein created. He invented the languages, then started writing the Silmarillion, which gave the languages and the people who spoke them a history. Then he wrote the Hobbit, and after realizing that the two stories took place in the same world, wrote the Lord of the Rings.

MB said...

I got The Hobbit as a gift when I was very young, and tried to read it but just couldn't get into it. I guess I have enough trouble with the English language, without trying to get into an invented language.

Paul Burgess said...

Yol sghinisor omchothripis. Mna Vanantha capoyin pantho sfagi sani santha yol smasathisor schothiliso cimvom ikram yothol yom il, mna ghthi jazvaisw'altii sdhnampo chovac'igist. Krathov schothracatw'ompsarisol, mna Tolkien thonghaghsathom chasathamdh cmonol yil idiso, ghty'ommaslias dvo sanin thro ghji sany'anthap Tolkien il somchasliiso mna Vananthath.

(English translate: "Thanks for the mention. Hermetic, which I started constructing thirty-five years ago, is an important part of who I am, but explaining it to other people is often difficult. As I said in my post, Tolkien is the best-known language-maker in our world today, but I began to construct Hermetic two or three years before I ever heard of Tolkien.")