Short Version:

Here is some stuff I made up about a language that doesn’t exist, spoken by a culture that doesn’t exist, on a planet that doesn’t exist. This hobby can be tedious at times, but it has been a fixation since my childhood and I miss it when I don’t work on it. So, since I go to the trouble of making it all up, I will be sharing some snippets of what I’ve been working on, just for fun.
J.

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Loooong Version:

I think I was about 11 when I started my first conlang (constructed language), though, at the time, I didn’t know there was a word for what I was doing.

I had read many fantasy novels, and I wanted to write one of my own. I was making up a place in which to set a story, and drawing a map of it. When I began writing in place names, I realized that it might seem more realistic if some of the towns ended in the same sound, which might stand for “town” or “city,” but it was a little later that same day when I accidentally uttered an nonsense word in surprise, that I realized I could make up an entire language. This felt like a major revelation and I ran upstairs to begin.

I was very excited and began inventing words without much thought about being systematic. It was the beginnings of a language I would work on a lot over the years to come. Initially it was an elaborate cipher for English, word for word, but with a few sounds that English didn’t have. Later, I rewrote my entire dictionary of a few hundred words to standardize the spelling, and created a writing system based on that set of symbols. I also eventually changed a lot of the grammar to be less English-like, and rewrote my translated texts to incorporate those massive changes in structure. The language grew, and so did the imaginary culture it was set in.

It was always a fairly personal hobby, but I did tell my family and friends about it, and even recited poems and translations to them. My mother learned several oft-uttered phrases such as “I’m hungry,” and “My ankles hurt,” and “I am full of tranquility.”

During high school, someone I didn’t know very well approached me and timidly asked whether I really believed that I could used my made-up language to communicate with aliens.
Um, no, that would be awesome, but it was never something I believed.

Years later, I discovered “Ardalambion,” an extensive description of Tolkien’s languages, which linked me to Mark Rosenfelder’s “Virtual Verduria” and “Language Construction Kit,” (now available in an expanded print edition!), and Jeffrey Henning’s Babel Text Database. I also came across an internet mailing list (it still runs!) called “Conlang.” Between the Language Construction Kit and the Conlang listserv I discovered that many people had taken the hobby to extremes that I had never imagined, which both inspired and intimidated me. I never shared my languages with the list, partly because I was unable to phrase my ideas in linguistics terminology, and partly because I am a shy lurker at heart.

In my teens, I picked up a linguistics textbook that my mother had lying around and began to read it. The implications for my made-up languages were huge, but I didn’t feel up to rewriting my first language (which had a special place in my heart) so as I read the textbook, I created a new language, topic by topic, as a way of internalizing the information. It was never intended to be anything but a practice project, so I called in LearningLang.

I tinkered with other language projects through the years, including one that became quite elaborate, then abandoned the practice when I entered college full time (along with television, novels, and all too many family dinners). However, near the end of my college experience, I had an old familiar urge to write a story. I wrote a page or two before I became frustrated and decided I needed just a little information about the setting, such as government, climate, cultural norms, and … perhaps, just a naming language. That shouldn’t take too long, right? Just a phonology and a couple dozen words…
And the bug re-bit.
And here I am, sharing recordings and translations, a little bit at a time, as I develop what I hope will be my best suite of languages yet, and the world in which they are set.