So these people are saying that the majority of conlangers don't even plan to stick with their languages? They make, scrap, make, scrap, make conlangs for fun?
me tbh
Hmmmm. Are you going to scrap your wonderful elephant-people someday?
uwu!
I don't so much scrap as... shelf, i suppose. the slon are part of the first mayor conworld I built, which I still visit sometimes. I always think I'll someday collate and systematize that old place, but I never end up doing so. It was cool, with month-long days and engineered religions.
Someday . . .
It's been a while since I worked on the Hitans or the Mensinghians.
♂♥♂♀
Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 89,000 words and counting
I am a loyalist it seems. I learned aUI from Weilgart and then after 3 years began to amend it. It needed logical corrections no matter his genius. It's still coherent with his form and linguistic theory. My work is settled, and I'll make no further advancement. I have known his students and have students of my own. When they are interested to ask of it, I tell them my work has no authority. It may be further amended. Also, I connected with his daughters. They did not like that I messed with their genius father's project. They only asked I offer an originality of perspective and expression otherwise we would have copyright troubles. It is a 3S language. Weilgart did not invent this. It's very old. It's reasonable to be loyal to it since it's still useful and alive in the world mind.
This old way of language is relational to baby babble as well to trance religious tongues. It has a priori elements. I amended the aUI with respect.
Znex wrote: ↑14 Aug 2013 15:06
I'm relatively new to conlanging, having only really thought about doing it in the past few months, however it seems to me that I'm becoming a filler.
I already have three main proto-languages in mind for my conworld:
Whelp that didn't last for very long!
I'm very much a scrapper, with maybe bits of perfectionist.
I started conlanging 13 years ago with a language called Andish. That went through three complete overhauls over the next five years (the third version was renamed to Teremazhi). Then I worked on Redentran for a couple years, tossed it, and did another revision of Teremazhi. After that, I spent another couple years working on Bwángxùd. Then I resurrected Teremazhi as a once-again fully rewritten language now called Atili, which is in its third major revision.
I've also dabbled with several "future English" conlangs, but none of these have made it much past phonology.
Five new types have just been added to the roster!
Unlike scrappers, sandboxers don't even plan on settling down with their conlanging. Like a kid playing in a sandbox, sandboxers will build castles, canals, and moats, only for them to be blown away or knocked over by the end of the session. They are, as gc12847 put it, "language nerds who make conlangs for fun and rarely develop them fully". Sandboxers conlang because it's fun, and, once they grow tired of a language, they'll scrap it for a new one. Sandboxers scrap not because their conlang is newbish, not because it's unworkable, not because it has a grating phonology or orthography, but because they've grown bored with it. Like scrappers, sandboxers seldom develop a language developed enough to translate 2,000-word texts or hold impromptu conversations in, and certainly they'll never build a lexicon the size of Kankonian's or write a grammar on their language as bulky as Siųa's, but then again, they don't really have any conlang that they put so much heart into as to develop it that far. As language nerds, they normally exhibit most of the traits associated with nerdiness, such as introversion; social anxiety; a taste for role-playing, video games, and comic books; trouble with making conversation about subjects outside their area of interest; the ability to get majorly into an interest; dressing for comfort instead of style; a liking for, and hardline adherence to, rules; and being emotionally reserved. When sandboxers die, they will have nothing to show for their life of conlanging when it comes time to write the obituary, and all their work will soon be forgotten. But that's OK with them, because they aren't doing it for the fame nor for the glory nor for having a project that will outlive them, nor for any serious social or philosophical purpose; they conlang only because they find it fun. Often a sandboxer's conlangs are, like the snowmen that Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes built only to have them melt, a testament to "the very evanescence of life itself".
Spawners are like the fish and amphibians that spawn thousands of eggs, knowing at least a few of them will hatch, but also knowing that not all of them will grow into fertile adults. Their brains are fecund with ideas for many different conlang projects, and they start them all just to see which of them last. As Molly learns in the children's book Molly's Rosebush, not every bud on the rosebush opens into a rose, and not every egg in a robin's nest hatches into a robin. Some of their conlang ideas will eventually dry up, after which they may be rediscovered and played with anew . . . or rediscovered only to be faced with the realization that the life is no longer there. But others eventually grow into some of the most resplendent roses or mellifluous robins in the entire forest. Spawners innovate many interesting ideas, each of which often gets a separate language to test it as their biggest weakness is their inability to combine multiple ideas into one conlang. [Thanks to Mira for suggesting this one.]
Remappers have a lot of filler in them, but they drop some of their conlangs -- not because the conlangs are too newbish or aesthetically unpleasing, nor because they get bored of them, but out of logistical necessity. As a remapper envisions and reënvisions his or her suite of conlangs, the languages he or she will have in that suite come and go. Maybe the dwarves who once populated her whole continent of Zastravia are now confined to the 2,000-square-mile nation of Larydon, so a whole bunch of dwarvish langs need to be scrapped. Or perhaps the remapper had a whole bunch of conlangs descended from Tenuma, but after he changed the whole history of immigration and conquests, he discovers he needs to replace the Tenumaic language family with a Qurqunic language family descended from the theretofore also-ran conlang Qurquni. Maybe it hits her that the nuclear war on the planet Ageplon would have indubitably wiped out the zhmoni, so she can't have zhmoni languages spreading throughout the galaxy after that atomic holocaust. Or perchance he is working with conlangs to experiment with language acquisition in different primate species, and during the development one of the species of primates goes extinct, while they discover that these two types of orangutans are in fact two different species. The best-laid plans of aliens and men go oft awry, and remappers soldier on and keep their options open accordingly.
Paralytics have a small number of conlangs that they've been working on for years; the longevity of a paralytic's conlang often rivals that of a loyalist's conlang. But over the decades, precious little work has been done on their conlang. They read thousands of articles on Wikipedia, articles in academic journals, books about linguistics, and grammars of obscure languages of Brazil and Vanuatu with sundry exotic features, and have thousands of ideas for things they could put into their own conlangs. To their credit, paralytics are careful to avoid creating kitchen sink conlangs, so they think cautiously about how to avoid putting too many features that won't work well together in the same conlang. With all these grammatical features, though, they'll spend decades daydreaming about the possibilities without ever putting anything on paper. As Thomas H. Chappell put it: "I get bored with being frustrated by my hampered progress. Like, for instance, do I mean a picnic-basket, or a laundry-basket, when I say 'hamper'? And is it related, at all, to 'hampster'? And why isn't the /p/ sound in 'hamster' written? And should my conworld even have such questions be relevant to it?" This analysis paralysis prevents them from ever having much to show, and long text translations are out of the question. But maybe, just maybe, after sixty or seventy years of conlanging, the Boltzmann brain may finally come together as all the myriad working pieces of the conlang's phonology, lexicon, and grammar work themselves out and produce something truly grand.
Misplacers want to keep their conlangs; they don't voluntarily scrap them. But they keep losing them anyway. They'll work out phonemic inventories and declension and conjugation paradigms on pieces of paper that they fold up and put in their pants pocket, but they'll forget to take the paper out of the pocket before they ask their mother to wash those pants. Then they'll move house and store the only information on their conlang they have on a floppy disk, only for their little brother to play with magnets around that floppy disk. Or they'll keep their entire body of conlanging work in a flash drive, only for their flash drive to be stolen when they take it to school one day. Misplacers are, without a doubt, the most tragic of the conlanger types, forever wondering what could have been.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 89,000 words and counting
In a more serious tone: scrapper, and proud of it. Just a few days ago I got rid of all of the filler that had developed and scrapped Laakitlantu, Iyamri, Ḳnācʰm, Kperı, and Ksaarha. But now I have Urjafwa and Hánásö, and they'll probably stay.
My plan is to make a bunch of languages, see which ones I like the most, make those the protolanguages for this continent of Rekeni, and see how it plays out over around 5,000 years to produce the modern ones.
Hopefully I can get it done...
Proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-Viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-September-6th-2022 gang
Ruykkarraber languagesNgamaAreyaxi languagesArskiilzKahóraMakihipŋAħual2c2ef0 my garbage