bloodyrosemccoy | Kiddie Conlangs

I finished Fairest a few days ago, and I liked it. As

dormouse_in_tea notes, it’s not quite as spectacular as Ella Enchanted—once I read Ella, I came to the conclusion that nobody had to ever retell the Cinderella story again, because Gail Carson Levine had won. But I liked the turn this gave the Snow White tale—you get real characters, and interesting motivations, and I like the way she works in the princes beforehand so they aren’t just personality-less dudes. And as I’m sure many people were, I was pleased that the heroine wasn’t bedazzling (although she did kind of beat that into the ground).

Plus, there was the irresistible attraction of her linguistics experiments, which after a bit of analysis* I have dubbed kiddie conlangs.

She uses a number of fairly straightforward techniques and a lot of visual things in her languages—Ogrese uses double letters and capitalizes them, Gnomic punctuates backwards, with periods at the beginning and capitals at the end, Abdegi (the giant language) has screeches and howls, and each word in Ayorthaian begins and ends with agreeing vowels. It seems a little bit obvious, but it’s got appeal for kids—something I never would have thought of.

I’d like to know more about her conlangs, to tell the truth. I’d like to know if all of them are like the ones in Ella and Fairest. I wonder what gave her the idea to add those languages, and how in-depth they are, and if she does others. I’ve looked around the internet a bit, but while I’ve found a few analyses, I haven’t found any first-hand comments by her, which is what I really want to see.

But I do have to credit her with being one of the first to suggest to me that not only did other people conlang, but they also could use it commercially. It’s pretty cool!

*Oh, come, now. You can’t be seriously surprised that I analyzed them.