What got you started in Conlanging?

[focle]

Hello to all, I'm new to the CBB.

I'm curious as to what lead you to conlanging? In my case when we got cable TV for the first time (in 1978) one of the channels was from Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, it was a French language station and I was so intrigued that I wanted to learn French. A friend of mine took Spanish in school and we started to compare the two languages. Their differences in phonemics and syntax sparked the first conlang we made called Espenglish (a combination of Spanish, French and English). We didn't get very far with it, just a bunch of words in a list -- which I still have. I moved with my parents about six months later and my interest in Espenglish disappeared. My interest in conlanging didn't reappear until almost 10 years later.

[Ossicone]

I have been conlanging since I was about 12 because I got fed up with the fact that at my school they didn't teach foreign languages until later. When I did get to take classes, I learned Spanish and German.

For me conlanging and concultures go together, because you can't have a language without people.

I am 22 and last year I graduated with a degree in Linguistics and Psychology.

(Copy and pasted from the old forum.)
(Edit: My birthday has passed I am now 22.)

[reizoukin]

Even when I was 5, I would speak gibberish and say it was my own language. I always enjoyed looking at other languages, even though I've never really learned any.

One day, though, I had this great idea--what if there was a language where the SOUNDS of the word corresponded to the meaning? I researched to see if such an idea existed and found out about phonosemantics. And then I looked up whether or not there was a language based on phonosemantics, and I learned the word conlanging, and it went on from there.

I still want to create a language based on phonosemantics, but I'ma wait till I'm better at this stuff. :D

[Sankon]

For a 5th grade History project, I was assigned to make a presentation on Egyptian hieroglyphs. That lead me to this big, awesome book on natlang scripts (unfortunately, I forgot its name). That lead to me being interested in other natlangs and conscipting, which led to conlanging.

Been hooked ever since.

No wait, I forgot a step. Tolkien.

Lots of "consonstructors" are inspired by Tolkien's work; I am the same. When I found Omniglot.com, I read about Tengwar (and a bunch of other inspiring things). I had read LOtR recently, and that sparked a fuse. I rushed to my favorite section of the series, the Appendix, and saw that he had Quenya and Sindarin and god knows what else. That is what made me interested in conlanging.

Oh, and you can't forget Latin. Before I took Latin, my interest for conlanging waned a bit, but it flared up again once I started the class.

[Ilaeriu]

Conworlding started it, which in turn was started by writing fantasy fiction. I made my first conworld when I was around 7, give or take a year. I still remember it quite vividly: A chunk of flat land floating in space in the shape of a cross. Each "arm" of the cross was the manifestation of one of the (European) elements. Earth was a giant forest, water was a great ocean, fire was a desert, and air was a mountain range. The center of the cross was the capital city of the conworld where all the elements met. I even got as far as designing an entire political system for the conworld :P I was an odd 7-year-old, looking back at it.

At the same time I was devising a conscript for the world, which was little more than a cipher. I had based it loosely on the Latin alphabet. I had a specific system, actually. For example the capital "A" had two long lines and one short, so the letter "a" in my conscript had two long lines and one short line. Obviously problematic in hindsight, a reason it was quickly abandoned :P

[Etherman]

When I was in High School my brother tried his hand at conlanging, I think because he'd heard about Esperanto. I thought it was a cool idea and made a Germanic-English one. It was little more than a code for English and my documentation on it no longer exists. I didn't get hooked until I was in college when I stumbled upon a Yahoo webpage on artificial languages. This led me to the Language Construction Kit and I haven't stopped since.

[Micamo]

Tolkien.

If you couldn't tell Agyonnar's a pretty big Quenya clone phonology-wise.

[SLiV]

Latin.

I was (age 12; 5 years ago) intrigued by Latins conjugations and whatnot, but found them to be "not strict enough". My first language, Sandritu, had as main goal to be strict. I guess it turned out to be too strict, 'cause my interest slowly calmed down, until it died about a year ago. I created a new one, Λυрιοнεcκι (Lurioneski), this time based on ancient Greek.

[masako]

A book that I ordered from Weekly Reader when I was eleven. I believe the title was "Secret Codes and Ciphers", or some such. It had several 1-1 ciphers and a few things about how to generate complex ciphers, but what I focused on was the section on the PigPen/Masonic Alphabet.

That led to Ajaran (a cipher-lang), which led to Qatama (a conlang that was built on the phonolgy of Ajaran) which has led me more recently to Kala.

[Curlyjimsam]

For me it was basically that when I was younger I had a made-up world, and I was sensible enough to realise that for everyone to just start speaking English just wasn't realistic.

It really took off when I discovered Langmaker.com maybe seven or eight years ago, and in the months following also came across Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit and then some time after that the Zompist BBoard.

[Ike Dexu]

Very simply,

I made 2 friends; Ward and Willem. They were (and still are) dutch. I asked them to teach me some dutch. They taught me some dutch, and I fumbled with the sounds and spellings seen as they didnt tell me how to pronounce them. I gradually learnt more and more Dutch until I got decent at it. It just happened that at the time I was also learning German, and the grammar i learnt from Dutch was useful in German. I started to love speaking in other ways. Eventually:

'WHAT IF I MADE MY OWN!'

And so my journey begins. Constantly changing from one idea for a language to the next, learning more about Grammar, case, Phonology, and making a few discoveries of my own. I now want to write a book on Linguistics :]

[LetoAtreides]

First version of Nolikan was created in 1999 and it consisted of a wordlist only (because I realized the conpeople need a language of their own). Some words I made at that time are still present, such as dode 'road' or muryo 'cat'. Later I added some Arabic, Persian and Chechen words which I learned since I was interested in Islam. The phonology was obviously the same as Polish but without palatalized consonants and "stupid Slavic consonant clusters". In 2003-2007 my interest in conlanging waned. Later, when I had started studying linguistics, I recreated my conlang, this time giving it a non-IE grammar.

My first language, Sandritu, had as main goal to be strict

Strict in what sense ?

[MrKrov]

I forget why. Probably something to do with boredom.

[masako]

I forget why. Probably something to do with boredom.

Ironic explanation.

[Rik]

After half a dozen French lessons I flicked through the textbook and decided I could come up with something better.

[SLiV]

(...)

My first language, Sandritu, had as main goal to be strict

Strict in what sense ?

In the sense that there was a minimal of ambiguity. E.g. -k was the accusative suffix, and therefore there could be no verbs or adverbs ending on -k. Same for -n and -p and all the vowels and -s.
That was one of the things that made it kinda annoying sometimes to come up with new words.

The irony was that although it wasn't very ambiguous, it wasn't getting that much easier a language.

My new lang isn't that strict - it has a lot of vowel merges (e.g. α+ο>ω) and double suffices (e.g. -ωc can be any gender; -ιc can be 2nd singular or general nominative) - but I think I have learned a lot more words and rules in 6 months than I did of Sandritu in 6 years. Plus, it is much more fun.

[Maximillian]

My interest in conlanging started when I began learning French at school back in the 7th grade. I wasn't that interested in it then, so I wasn't that good a learner. Somehow, I became more and more fascinated with the language, but it was still hard for me to master. So, I started to play with French words, and slowly developed my first conlang. This word-game evolved into a romlang. Since no language can exist without people speaking it, I created a fictional island-country called Port Octavios. That was my first true conlang. =]

[Nortaneous]

Back when I was a little high school comp sci nerd, I spent most of my free time reading Wikipedia and somehow discovered Lojban. I spent about two minutes trying to learn it and decided it would be faster to make my own, so I shat out a horrible VSO Esperanto with the phonology of English except without a few vowels and with four laterals and /2/, then got bored of it a month later.

[xBlackWolfx]

I've been interested in foreign cultures ever since that anime craze from when i was a kid. the first language i tried to learn was japanese. quickly i started trying to learn other languages, finnish swedish spanish italian french german and i even had a brief interest in arabic after september 11. once i asked my mother what was the easiest language to learn and she told me esperanto. after i got older and more became more knowledgable about languages i realized that esperanto isnt perfect and began my quest to create a perfect auxlang. i've since pretty much given up on that goal, now all i want is a language i can write in that no one will understand. but i'm honestly sick of trying to think up my own language. i cant decide how i want the language to sound and that one little fact has held me back for years. but sadly i cant find a conlang that actually works outside of esperanto (and i cant type it very easily) but despite this i'm still teetering on giving up but i probably wont until i find a language i can type and is actually usable. still think about the phonology of my language, but i seriously doubt i'll ever actually get around to creating it. there's plenty of other ppl interested in conlanging and perhaps one day a conlang will come along that's to my liking, i seriously doubt i can count on it, but that's probably my only hope.

[MrKrov]

Not an ironic explanation at all.

now all i want is a language i can write in that no one will understand. but i'm honestly sick of trying to think up my own language. i cant decide how i want the language to sound and that one little fact has held me back for years.

Protip: if it's just for writing, phonology shouldn't be a problem.