If this is intriguing to you, there's a very active subreddit for this at /r/conlangs. The community there ranges from folks just fooling around with simple English relexes, to fairly formal investigations into weird linguistic features like split ergativity.
There's a discord for learning languages that is doing one as well. It's a pretty massive server I joined to try and learn different languages. I'm not sure how related they are to that subreddit though.
Thank you for posting that article - I've never read it before. There's many things John Q says in the article that resonate strongly with me.
I've never viewed my attempts at conlanging as anything more than self-indulgent art. I found the passage where John outed himself as a 'conlanger' to his work colleagues hilarious:
> “People at work now held me in some sort of state of half awe, because this guy obviously has more going on in his head than being a manager at this dopey state agency, and half in contempt, because I’ve now proved myself to be beyond whatever state of geekery they might have previously thought about me,” Quijada said. “‘You’re a what? A con man?’ ‘No, boss, a conlanger.’”
I've learned over time not to be ashamed of my hobby - in fact I'm happier to reveal to people that I invent languages than I am to admit to my other hobby: writing poetry.
It was my desire (need) to share my work with those few people who might be interested in it that first drove me to teach myself how to code up websites - so in a way my weird hobby has had a positive effect on my life: web development and coding became a new passion that has kept me out of trouble for 2 decades now, and has been my profession for the past 5 years.
Now I'm itching to redevelop my old conlang/conworld website - I haven't done much with it for 10 years; looking at the code that drives it today ... it makes me cringe with embarrassment!
...and he stood holding his hat and turned his wet face to the wind...
tee rũnũ shũ naapoo lẽ teetũ tee pũkii lẽ shamõ teepã õ undefined
Pronunciation: /teː ˈrũnũ ʃũ naːˈpoː lẽ teːˈtũ teː pũˈkiː lẽ ʃaˈmõ ˈteːpã õ ˌundeˈfined/
Naawo word order: and stood he holding hat his and turned his face wet to the wind
I wonder what's going on with that word for 'wind'!
(Whenever I generate a new language on the site, the word for 'wind' is always "undefined".)
14 comments
[ 70.1 ms ] story [ 909 ms ] threadThere's also other channels on YouTube; my favorite is Biblaridion's; their How To Make A Language series might be a good intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHK1gO2Mh68&list=PL6xPxnYMQp...
When did my shameful little hobby suddenly get so popular??
I've never viewed my attempts at conlanging as anything more than self-indulgent art. I found the passage where John outed himself as a 'conlanger' to his work colleagues hilarious:
> “People at work now held me in some sort of state of half awe, because this guy obviously has more going on in his head than being a manager at this dopey state agency, and half in contempt, because I’ve now proved myself to be beyond whatever state of geekery they might have previously thought about me,” Quijada said. “‘You’re a what? A con man?’ ‘No, boss, a conlanger.’”
I've learned over time not to be ashamed of my hobby - in fact I'm happier to reveal to people that I invent languages than I am to admit to my other hobby: writing poetry.
It was my desire (need) to share my work with those few people who might be interested in it that first drove me to teach myself how to code up websites - so in a way my weird hobby has had a positive effect on my life: web development and coding became a new passion that has kept me out of trouble for 2 decades now, and has been my profession for the past 5 years.
Now I'm itching to redevelop my old conlang/conworld website - I haven't done much with it for 10 years; looking at the code that drives it today ... it makes me cringe with embarrassment!
http://www.rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/index.php
(Whenever I generate a new language on the site, the word for 'wind' is always "undefined".)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557830
1. Novial, because it is extremely regular with simple rules
2. Ido, because it is a simplified version of Esperanto, which itself has a non-trivial number of speakers.
3. Interlingua, because it is roughly a simplified modern romance language, which themselves have hundreds of millions of native speakers.
Lojban
Ithkuil
Controlled English