Christmas Day
Chanukah (Jewish - begins at sundown)
It is a time-honored, well-observed phenomenon that other people’s hobbies, unless you share them, are boring. There is nothing rude about this; it is natural human psychology. I am bored by something you genuinely enjoy doing and will do because you want to instead of because you have to; you are bored by something I can spend days absorbed by and find most fascinating.
However, the fruits of your hobby can be a different matter. Putting together model ships is boring to me, but seeing the finished ones is neat. I’m not interested in gardening, but I love gardens. And thus, I have decided that over the course of the next, I don’t know, indefinite length of time, I am going to showcase the results of my hobby in this hapless blog.
Unfortunately, said hobby bears a bit of explanation.
My interest in conlanging is all Yoshi’s fault. Yoshi, the little dinosaur from Super Mario. Oh, don’t give me that look; I’m serious. See, I used to write daft little stories he’d appear in (I like Yoshi, okay?!), and somewhere along the way I stuck in some Yoshese. At first it was just a string of nonsense words, but then, as I added more, it occurred to me that it couldn’t be random, and that I’d have to make it cohesive. So I wrote a few more sentences and thought, “This is fun.”
And I was doomed.
Actually, I didn’t start up officially for a few more years, but I got really interested in natural languages, and then I got evil and started wondering What If as applied to syntax, and then I decided to write down my ideas. And then I was writing a story featuring sprites,* and I gave them the language, and I was off for real and making rules and dictionaries and everything.
I don’t know who I was imitating, or even if I was imitating anyone. I might have been vaguely aware of Klingon, and I had actually already read the Lord of the Rings, but it had never really sunken in that John Ronald invented his own languages, or that Klingon was something people could speak. (Thinking back, I missed a lot of stuff the first time I read LotR. In my defense, I was a kid.) It just seemed like a good idea. I think there was a little spite thrown in, because I distinctly remember reading in some grammar book, when it was trying to make a point about an unpopular rule, “you will never invent your own language with a working system, so just stick with this one,” and I thought, “Oh YEAH?!” But I found out later (I love the internet) that I was one of thousands of people who do this sort of thing for fun and profit, and it was then that I realized it had become a hobby of mine.
And now I’ve got all these … these languages.
I want to show them off. I’m proud of them. I spent a lot of time and happy effort coming up with these things, and I want the same right to display them as gardeners or model makers have. So I will … over the next while I’ll post outlines, very basic ones (because it would be sadistic to go into too much detail), of the model languages I’ve come up with so far. I’ll give you samples of how to say things, using some of the handy translation exercises I get online and the estimable aide of the Language Bird,** and explain some of the interesting features of each one. And maybe you’ll even be interested enough to read.
I won’t blame you if you don’t, though. Your hobby bores me, anyway.
*The sprites are my elf-like people. This pains me, because I despise Elves, but the idea is the same: I wanted the sprites, who are from a sort of alternate Earth, to be the people who’ve managed things, if not right, then better than we have. It’s not a utopia, but it’s a nice place to live. But I was clear on a few things: they can make mistakes, they aren’t all good, and they aren’t all ethereal nancibald primroses. They’re a little smaller than humans on average, but you can have fat ones or tall ones or plain ones or disabled ones or whatever. You can also have rude ones and shallow ones alongside the sweet wise ones. Also, the black-skinned breed or race or whatever you want to call it is the biggest influence on civilization. Partly this was a decision based on their world’s geography, but some of it was also because it irritates me that that never happens. (Don’t even MENTION drow to me.)
Basically, I work on the philosophy that I want all my fantasy creatures to be, when you step back, pretty much people. I think Dave Barry put it best when he visited Japan and summed it up: “The Japanese are people, and people everywhere, when you strip away their superficial differences, are crazy.”
**Don’t worry, this’ll make sense later.
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