Introduction thread(s)

What can I say? It doesn't fit above, put it here. Also the location of board rules/info.
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Whiterose
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Whiterose »

Egerius wrote:Whiterose, don't worry - concultures and conworlds are as apprechiated here as are conlangs, since one leads to the other.
Braenor, the world I am developing at the moment for a story, has a very small dictionary of words that are my feeble attempt at a conlang. But thank you for telling me that I am not out of place here just because I have not mastered the IPA yet.
Current Conworld: Braenor -|- Link to topic.
Feel free to ask questions about me or my creations. I'm always open for them. The more odd the question, the more fun I have putting it into context with my conworld.
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elemtilas
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by elemtilas »

Whiterose wrote:Hello. My name is Whiterose. I'm a guy if my name is confusing to you, it happens a lot.
Welcome indeed!
I am new, as you can probably tell, and know next to nothing about conlangs. I am interested in finding out more, though fear my lack of diligent study on the matter will be less than ideal.
This is really not a problem at all. You will eventually discover that there are as many ways to make a language as there are folks who make them! There is no one right way, although some folks here (and indeed elsewhere) will be more than happy to tell you how to make a language. You can buy work books and how-to books. You can visit instructional websites and watch tutorial videos. You can ask folks here or on any of a dozen other forums and mailing lists. They will teach you what you have to do first and what you have to do second -- they'll take you through all the steps from A to Zed! My wish for you, really, is to take every kind of instruction and tutorial (including anything I might tell you!) and throw it out the window. You will be your own best teacher; and the conlang you are discovering, especially when it comes from the very heart of your own conculture, will be your very best guide! That's right -- if you let it, your conculture's language will reveal itself to you. Best thing you can do, really, is to do some basic study on linguistic and grammatical terminology (Wikipedia is actually a pretty good resource) and then take a look at how a couple different languages work, how their grammars work, how their phonological systems work.

With that basic knowledge in your head, take a fresh look at your conculture, the people who live in it, the things they make and use every day, the way they do what they do, the festivals they celebrate and the saints they venerate. Start thinking about not so much "what" they say, but how they sound when they talk. Then write down what you hear them saying -- words, sentences -- even if you don't yet know what they mean. Then, using what you've learned from your readings in linguistics and grammar and syntax and so forth, start figuring out what it all means! I find the results of this kind of conlanging to be much more natural and less like a construction. Also, there is much to be said, I think, for the work of the naive conlanger -- the sensitive & creative conlanger who doesn't really know a lot about what they're doing, but just plunges in without really worrying about what everyone else is doing or how everyone else thinks. Sure, it is possible for such a conlanger to come up with a horrible failure; but it is also possible for such a one to reveal an exquisite and beautiful piece of work indeed!
I am more interested (AKA better at) conworlds and concultures, which are the main reason I joined this blog. I write a little as a hobby and am building it into a profession, world building is my favourite aspects and I hope that here I may be able to learn a little more, share what I have done, and incorporate a little bit of conlanging into my writing.

That being said, I hope to see you all around. I'll be making a few posts here and there soon. Thanks.
I very much hope you will start up a thread on your concultures in the Conculture Forum! We'd love to hear what you have to say and discuss what's going on in your otherworld!
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Sami-Fire »

Hello! My name is Sami, and I am completely new at conlanging.

I'm trying to make a conlang for one of my worlds, and I'm finding that I pretty much have no idea what I'm doing. As it stands right now, my conlang is some kind of odd English-Japanese mashup (English grammar with some tweaks, Japanese phonetic and spelling structure) with some special suffixes thrown in here and there. I have (or will have; the language is very much under construction) a certain set of suffixes called Personalization Suffixes, which allow a speaker to express how they feel about a topic (if attached to a noun) or something they are doing (if attached to a verb- can also apply to what someone else is doing). I feel like more potential aspects can be added to allow the speakers to "personalize" their language, as self-expression is a very important thing to the culture that speaks the language, so I'll be posting about that elsewhere later!

It's not terribly fancy, I know, but I wanted something simple to work with for my first go at conlanging. I look forward to meeting you all!
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by shimobaatar »

Hello, welcome to the CBB!
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by jhcampbell »

Hello, folks -

My conlanging bug was intense after high school about (oh, I was thinking five years ago - but actually, it was 2005.. so, in reality, ten years ago. How time flies!) ten years ago. Then, it went away a bit as I'm busy with college and many major life changes.

Just about a week or two ago, I started listening to the Conlangery podcast (if William, George, Bianca, and Michael are reading this - I really like it and thanks a lot for your hard work!). And now the bug is back. Apart from exchanging a few emails with David J. Peterson, I never actually get involved with the online conlanging community that time. Now I think I'd explore more while my conlanging bug is moving. [:D]

Anyway, just want to say hi. I'm a native speaker of Burmese language, and maybe I'll gather some thoughts and create a guide for orthography or grammar or both.

Qapla'
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Schoenike
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Schoenike »

Hi everyone, I'm Schoenike [:)]

My 2016 resolution is to create a conlang so here I am! I graduated with a linguistics degree several years ago but since I now have a non-linguistics related job, I thought conlanging would be a fun way to keep my skills up, and also be totally cool.

I am a big fan of the XCOM games, so my goal is to create a language for the world in XCOM 2 (in which our alien overlords have taken over Earth). The interesting thing about XCOM is that all of the alien races communicate telepathically, so they have no need for spoken language. However, the humans who are under alien control begin speaking a language never before heard on Earth... To me this tells me that the aliens have been doing some conlanging of their own! And now I get to figure out what sort of language that is [:)]

(I know it's not a world of my own invention but I figure a fanlang is better than nothing. "Fanlang" is a thing, right?)
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elemtilas
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by elemtilas »

Schoenike wrote:Hi everyone, I'm Schoenike [:)]

My 2016 resolution is to create a conlang so here I am! I graduated with a linguistics degree several years ago but since I now have a non-linguistics related job, I thought conlanging would be a fun way to keep my skills up, and also be totally cool.
Well I'll go to foot of our stair. An actual linguistician has condescended from the lofty heights to join the ranks of glossopoets! Welcome to the forum!
I am a big fan of the XCOM games, so my goal is to create a language for the world in XCOM 2 (in which our alien overlords have taken over Earth). The interesting thing about XCOM is that all of the alien races communicate telepathically, so they have no need for spoken language. However, the humans who are under alien control begin speaking a language never before heard on Earth... To me this tells me that the aliens have been doing some conlanging of their own! And now I get to figure out what sort of language that is [:)]
Dunno what XCOM is, but sounds like an interesting project! Perhaps the aliens had to create a (spoken) conlang in order to communicate with the humans (who presumably are not telepathic)?
(I know it's not a world of my own invention but I figure a fanlang is better than nothing. "Fanlang" is a thing, right?)
Yes, it is a thing, as a matter of fact!

By the way, it might be interesting to hear what your experience is / has been regarding Conlanging in Academia.
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Schoenike
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Schoenike »

elemtilas wrote:Well I'll go to foot of our stair. An actual linguistician has condescended from the lofty heights to join the ranks of glossopoets! Welcome to the forum!

By the way, it might be interesting to hear what your experience is / has been regarding Conlanging in Academia.
Thank you! And until I read this I didn't realize there was such a stigma against conglanging in academia. (After all I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the conlang course that I took in college!) In any case I look forward to spending more time on the forum, even if it means associating with you lowly conlangers [;)]
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Dormouse559
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Dormouse559 »

Welcome to the board, Schoenike. Fanlangs are definitely a thing. A bit ago, I worked on fleshing out Atlantean from "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" and for a while I also considered Alternian from Homestuck.
Schoenike wrote:even if it means associating with you lowly conlangers [;)]
Hey, lofty-minded glossopoets, we. [:D]
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by eldin raigmore »

Schoenike wrote:And until I read this I didn't realize there was such a stigma against conglanging in academia.
I think that stigma is going away, or is an older-generation thing, or, at least, is not shared among all linguisticians.
Linguisticians like Marc Okrand (Star Trek languages) and Helen Charteris (Vampiric, 30 Days of Night) and David Petersen (Game of Thrones) have actually been sought out and paid by filmmakers or TV-series makers to make conlangs.
Since that's been happening, many academic linguisticians have decided there is value in conlangs. Probably, some of them were already leaning that way since Tolkien (and his "successors") used conlangs in books.

In increasingly many sciences (astrophysics and cosmology, for example; climatology too), simulation (especially computer simulation) has for some time been increasingly acceptable as an investigative tool.
The parallel in linguistics is -- at least to my mind -- to test a linguistic hypothesis (such as, at random, "Any tripartite object-initial language with a vertical vowel-system would have to have more prefixes than suffixes") which, for lack of examples, couldn't be verified among the minority of natlangs for which adequate reference grammars have been published, by producing a (or some) conlang(s) and testing them for speakability, intelligibility, and learnability.

Some of us think that the objections to conlanging of some of the academic linguisticians, is that, with at least two-thirds of the world's natlangs endangered and inadequately even recorded (much less adequately studied), it's a WOMBAT to conlang instead of going out and doing field-work.
If that's true (and I guess we don't really know), then it ignores the fact that most of us can't afford to do any field-work; and that our "consumption" of the linguisticians' work-product is at least a drop in the bucket towards supporting their work.
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by jute »

Hello people,

I'm a user coming from CWS, and prior to that, /conlangs on Reddit, where I have the same name.
I'm actually studying some linguistics as part of one of my two majors, which is Scandinavian Studies, though it has not been much. So when I started developing a conlang for a nation on Nationstates, Jute, I still had a lot to learn.
But since having done that last summer, I have made a lot of progress in the half a year. I learned a lot about phonology, morphology and syntax, and last Lexember saw my lexicon grow to more or less twice its previous size.

Now I'm hoping to continue my learning process, and with the help and criticism of other users make Jutean a better language. It might have already been nominated for "Language of the Month" on CWS, but I know a lot can still be done to improve it. Hope I can learn a lot from you all :)
Jutean: Hawaiian phonology meets Tagalog, with English ergativity and Mandarin tenselessness added.
Also on CWS.
Information on Juteans and their homeland
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by prettydragoon »

Oh no, there goes the neighbourhood!

But seriously, welcome Jute! They are good people here.
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KaiTheHomoSapien
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Hi everybody. [:D] My name is Kai. I'm 16 and conlanging is one of my hobbies, even if I'm an amateur. Currently in school I'm studying Latin and independently I'm studying Greek and Sanskrit, so you can see I'm into old Indo-European languages. I'm also really interested in Australian aboriginal languages and native North American languages. I'm big into fantasy novels too, so that, combined with my love of languages in general, inspired to me to create my own conlang. I've also, along with it, created my own maps and stories about the fictional conworld where it's spoken so this forum seemed like it was exactly what I'm looking for. Kinda nervous about posting anything to do with my conlang, but I hope to do it soon and see what people think. [>_<]
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Welcome!

Your user name is very descriptive, I'd've never guessed you were human otherwise! [:)]
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KaiTheHomoSapien
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

^_^ Thanks for the welcome [:)]
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by gestaltist »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:Hi everybody. [:D] My name is Kai. I'm 16 and conlanging is one of my hobbies, even if I'm an amateur. Currently in school I'm studying Latin and independently I'm studying Greek and Sanskrit, so you can see I'm into old Indo-European languages. I'm also really interested in Australian aboriginal languages and native North American languages. I'm big into fantasy novels too, so that, combined with my love of languages in general, inspired to me to create my own conlang. I've also, along with it, created my own maps and stories about the fictional conworld where it's spoken so this forum seemed like it was exactly what I'm looking for. Kinda nervous about posting anything to do with my conlang, but I hope to do it soon and see what people think. [>_<]
Welcome. I am rarely excited by others' conlangs, but I can't wait to see your maps and stories.
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by WeepingElf »

Hallo, I am new here, but many here probably already know me from the ZBB. My real name is Jörg Rhiemeier, I live in Germany, am 46 years old, and my main conlang is Old Albic.
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Egerius
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Egerius »

Welcome, WeepingElf!
Languages of Rodentèrra: Buonavallese, Saselvan Argemontese; Wīlandisċ Taulkeisch; More on the road.
Conlang embryo of TELES: Proto-Avesto-Umbric ~> Proto-Umbric
New blog: http://argentiusbonavalensis.tumblr.com
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Dormouse559
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Dormouse559 »

Indeed, welcome! I've perused Old Albic's Frathwiki page before, so it's neat to see its creator has joined us.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Introduction thread(s)

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

WeepingElf wrote:Hallo, I am new here, but many here probably already know me from the ZBB.
Can't say that I do, but welcome just the same.
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