vecfaranti wrote:
[...] Conworlding is very overwhelming. Especially when it isn't clear what the end-goal of the exercise is.
I don't agree at all. Yes, it's a hard work to make a nation or an entire country with its culture, languages, politics and all the stuff it needs to resemble real, but I don't find it harder than creating a conlang that seems real and natural, presented in a complete and rigorous grammar. This requires a lot of thought and work too. I never found conworlding overhelming; at least this is not my experience, but that's very personal and subjective: I love history. I'm a history & archaeology graduate and I like anything related to history, which touches areas of knowledge tied with conwordery: politics, economic systems, voting systems, anthropology, traditions, mythology... I red and read things about that. Since I can remember, so I began my conworlding career as an early teenager, or even before. And I made fun of that. I mean, I didn't take it too seriously (in the begining, at least, until I merged my conworlding and conlanging stuff and I created something different, much more mature). Why? Because I didn't need an end-goal. I was playing with things I liked (and still like), and those things were the ingredients to make a more or less complex and realistic conworld. Maybe I was lucky, I don't know. I know people racking their brains in the development of their conworlds, not knowing how to start. The only thing I say to them is don't take it as a run, take it as fun. Investigate, read, learn... what you want, and start making bricks and constructing. No matter how long it will take if you are having fun.
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No one likes reading grammars.
[...]
And reading a grammar is a lot less interesting when it exists in a vaccuum.
Many people likes reading grammars. In this forum we've seen persons not interested at all in conworldery but only in conlangs, languages and linguistics. A few have read some grammars and posted reviews. I you go to the Almea section on this forum tou'll see how enough persons show inconsistencies and errors or typos on Zomp's Almean languages grammars. It shows there's people reading them.
Other people, like me, are not interested in grammars
per se but in conlang's surface. What I really like about conlangs is their flavour: the essence or soul that emanates from their structures, specially how they sound when spoken and their orthographies; and all the constuff related to them (writing systems, the history of the language, etc.) and how they fit their conworlds/nations/peoples. I'm not interested at all in syntax or morphology; that's for my languages, the ones I will really use. So I'm not a great reader of grammars. A conworld attached to a conlang is a point in favour. In fact, the few grammars I've red or glanced over at are related to conworlds I really like and appreciate.
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Zompist's [...] But getting to this stage took years and years and I still don't understand how he does it. Where does he get the time?
You answered yourself: years and years of work. He began his career as a teenager, IIRC. Or at least when he was very young. Now he's an adult. That means a lot of years, months, weeks, days and hours. I created Hellesan in 1992. That's almost 20 years of work on that conlang. And its conworld has been worked for 10-15 years. Think about all the summers, weekends and little moments one can do conworlding stuff... When considered as a whole that's a lot of time.
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So I wonder, is there a way to solve these problems? For context, we must work and work and work tirelessly. And the process usually ends up being private. This board is good for quick questions and socialising, but deep questions require outside research. For presentation, we must either have a lot of work already done, in order to get away with the website approach or we must set a goal for ourselves that goes beyond conlanging (and conworlding) for conlanging's (or conworlding's) sake.
Not so tirelessly. In my case, that is. To me it's not a job but a hobby. I mean, anyone can do a lot of work without becoming overwhelmed and too tired.
And yes, conworlding & conlanging is, after all, a personal research. If private or public that's another thing.
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Once I make a conlang, relatively in depth, I'm not easily willing to just discard it and not put it to use. I've gone through several main conworld settings, and I usually try to emigrate languages between them, because working on several conworlds at the same time is undoable for me. But often the case is, the languages don't fit the new setting. The words made for them, the feeling, the writing method etc. I'm not in love with my conworld, but I've had it in the back of my head for so long, I can't do away with it.
Maybe the problem is that? That you don't really love the scenario, so it's difficult to put all the elements on it?
Because the feeling of a language, its writing system or the lexicon it uses is not a real problem to make a conlang believable in a conworld. Look at our real world, with so many languages, writings and vocabularies... And all of them have its place.
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Trying to move Uscaniv to a new setting seems pretty much undoable. It would negate so much work already done. But I love Uscaniv. So how do I reconcile the two? For that, I have no answer. Except maybe work and work and work. But that doesn't seem appealing when I have to make a living for myself and turn in school work. Sometimes I wish I had never gotten into this. What's the point? But as I said earlier, it's probably the best exercise your brain could ever get. Hence the work required.
I changed the scenario a few times. And that was in my highschool years, with tons of work, exercises and exams and other diverting things. But I made it. I created the definitve setting for my constuff. I could change things in the future, true. I probably will... Look at Zomp's Great reclimatization. If that isn't a pothole... Will modify things, but not the entire world.