zompist bboard

I hope this is the right place to post this. I'm curious to know if there are other folks out there that find conlanging fascinating in general instead of just their own creations.

I enjoy looking at what folks come up with, especially more large-scale projects like Esperanto, Lojban, Toki Pona, and languages made for fictional races like Quenya, Klingon, D'ni, Na'vi.

Do you have any favorites? Why? Any you despise?

What I think of some more well-known conlangs:
Esperanto - I didn't know what a conlang was until I stumbled across it. If it weren't for Eo, I wouldn't have Sjal today Sure, I don't like how it sounds and sometimes it feels like I'm just speaking French with slightly different words, but then I get to words like antauxsciigi or disliberigxi and fall in love all over again. It's the only conlang I can speak decently without setting up camp in a dictionary.

Quenya - Major influence on Sjal in the beginning. Also got me into Finnish and the wonderful world of cases. And because I'm so original, I like how it sounds. It was also the first place I saw deliberately taking a proto form of a language and applying sound changes to get a modern form.

Klingon - I think the grammar and phonology are pretty interesting. And I like Star Trek

Siwa - The creation of one of our own conlangers here Very pretty and distinctive sounding, though the grammar glosses make my eyes glaze over since I don't understand most of it. I've been following Siwa's progress for a while and especially like the complex genitives and word formation.

Määda - I hope that's right. Also another creation of one of our conlangers. It has a lot of parallels with Sjal's structure, so it seems to mesh with how my brain puts thoughts together, on top of being pretty and pushing me to explore aspect further.

Lojban - I don't think a human being could ever speak this language. The fact that every root has multiple dissimilar short forms to memorize for compounds on top of every root having X number of semantic slots which mean arbitrary things... I tried to learn it once out of curiosity and my brain turned to jelly. I also don't care for how it sounds. Big props for originality (and mind-melting complexity), though.

Toki pona - A bit too simple vocabulary-wise for me. When "animal" is precise as you can get without delving into cascades of descriptors to get to "horse" or something, it's a turn-off for me. It is however one of the few oligosynthetic conlangs I respect.

Na'vi - I was pleasantly surprised to see some unusual features, like verb infixes and ejectives. I haven't looked very closely at it because I don't give a flip about Avatar, but I just might.

D'ni - When I first saw the writing system for this conlang (from the Myst series), I spent weeks trying to come up with fancy writing systems. It might be what started my passion for writing systems (stronger than for languages even). It sounds like a softer Hebrew. The creator stopped contributing vocabulary a while ago though, so I was discouraged from delving into it when the gaps in vocabulary require feats of creativity to speak around.

Anyway, what conlangs do you all appreciate or dislike or have experience with?

PS, I'd very much like for this thread not to become an Esperanto-bashing thread

Toki Pona makes me laugh. It looks like baby talk.

Don't have too big of list of other conlangs that I'm interested in. But here's the lot:

Na'vi--Although the orthography sucks and it bares some similarities to English, I was very impressed by the verbal system.

Ithkuil & Ilaksh--These langs are probably old and forgotten by now. Even though these loglangs will make your brain hurt--a lot!-- it's constructed so well that you can't help but fall in love with it. I've yet to read the full grammar *scurries off to do just that*

Tibetan Dwarven--Can't seem to find this lang on the ZBB anymore. I liked it for it's one word class--nouns--and the Word Order, and the phonology.

(More coming...if I remember)

I cannot count the ways Esperanto pisses me off.

The mainstream handful always cited bore me.

Personally I like ones I make.

Khuzdul - The little tiny bit that exists of this language is what got me interested in conlangs & linguistics in the first place.

Kēlen - The most famous all-noun language. I thought about doing an all noun lang, and then found this one. After looking through it, I set it aside for a while. Now that my lang has developed a bit, I can see that I'm handling things in a comparable manner to Kēlen, in that I have some auxiliary words that carry the syntactic info of verbs, but with no semantic content.

There's a few conlangs around the ZBB that I really like as well, such as Rawang Ata from Salmoneous and Uscaniv by Vecfaranti.

Conlangs declared to be nounless as a subset of conlangs without anything to verify claim X bug me.

Right now my favorite conlangs are my own, but there are others that are certainly better-made than mine, and which I also admire. These conlangs are of a type that would also be mine if I had enough time, skill, and the willpower to keep going.

Sjal wrote:Do you have any favorites? Why? Any you despise?

Top of my favourite list are Quenya and Sindarin, closely followed by Teonaht, Kelen and Verdurian.

Klingon is IMHO as ugly as an oil spill, and despite its exoticity, not particularly interesting. Most auxlangs are as uninteresting as the night sky above Krikkit.

Sjal wrote:Do you have any favorites? Why? Any you despise?
Anyway, what conlangs do you all appreciate or dislike or have experience with?

PS, I'd very much like for this thread not to become an Esperanto-bashing thread

Almost anything by Tolkien gets my approval, especially Quenya. Klingon is to most conlangs as Star Trek is to science-fiction, ironically enough. As for the E-word - let's just say I'm with Justin Rye.

Sometimes I think having access to info about so many other conlangs is harmful to my attitude, as I feel disgusted by some of them, and I envy the creativity or aesthetics of others and fear that I will never be able to measure up. I wish I could muster up the courage to smash my DSL modem and stay off the net for a year, I think I would get a lot more done with my own langs that way.

I really like Tolkien's languages, which got me interested in the idea of conlanging, and Zompist's, which got me interested in the hobby (especially Xurnese, though that came later). There are a few others that I like by people on the board, but I get most exposure through the Akana project.

In Esperanto's defense, it was the first conlang I ever came across. I remember being blown away that someone would try and build an entire language. It was like when Napster came out, and I started "discovering" bands that weren't that hard to hear about - Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam, and then Audiogalaxy led me to Magnetic Fields, and Neutral Milk Hotel, and Spoon, and Treepeople. Esperanto has also shown that a conlang can become a living language, something Quenya, Sindarin, and Klingon never could. So, you know, respect.

That said, right now I've been thinking Na'vi is pretty cool (even though I've managed to avoid seeing Avatar.) Conjugation by verbal infix is kind of cool (not necessarily groundbreaking, but cool.)

That said, right now I've been thinking Na'vi is pretty cool (even though I've managed to avoid seeing Avatar.) Conjugation by verbal infix is kind of cool (not necessarily groundbreaking, but cool.)

Same here. I actually think Avatar looks pretty stupid and I don't want to see it. But the few bits I've heard of Na'vi spoken are actually pretty nice. It might be partly the ejectives sounding exotic to my ears.

I might commit the cardinal sin of learning more conlangs than natural languages depending on if Frommer continues to develop the language. I feel guilty enough learning Sjal on top of Esperanto

Years ago I had decent written fluency in Klingon, but I've forgotten a lot from lack of practice.

Despite being pretty boring and aesthetically not great, Klingon is very tempting because it has an active online community of speakers (well, writers primarily). I had a good time with the mailing list folks, made friends, chatted about linguistics, had heated debates about linguistics, and so on. Not too unlike the ZBB, really. (There were even mailing list regulars who didn't like Star Trek...)

The language itself is easy because there's not much to learn, and what there is is very regular. Once you know the morphology you can pretty much jump in, and from there it's a matter of retaining vocabulary because you actually see it used from day to day on the mailing list. And it can be fun to use the little we have to figure out a way to express more complex stuff.

The top of my ABSOLUTE HATE list is mando'a, by Karen Traviss. It falls prone to about a million errors, including 'arrogant, annoying author who is unjustifiably proud of her creation' and englishcypherbutsimpler. Oh, and the use of the sci-fi apostrophe.

Quenya also bores me a bit. Sindarin's far more interesting as a development of it. Klingon looks, to me, like everybody's first language shortly after they discover the lists of cases and aspects on wikipedia and read the 'agglutinative' article. Khazdul got me interested in conlanging. The Old Tongue... well... uhh... it has potential. Unrealised potential.

Esperanto... well to be honest, if I'd been in Zamenhof's place, I'd probably've gone 'lol, accusative case is cool!' too, but that doesn't make it a good feature for an auxlang.

YngNghymru wrote:The top of my ABSOLUTE HATE list is mando'a, by Karen Traviss. It falls prone to about a million errors, including 'arrogant, annoying author who is unjustifiably proud of her creation' and englishcypherbutsimpler. Oh, and the use of the sci-fi apostrophe.

Quenya also bores me a bit. Sindarin's far more interesting as a development of it. Klingon looks, to me, like everybody's first language shortly after they discover the lists of cases and aspects on wikipedia and read the 'agglutinative' article. Khazdul got me interested in conlanging. The Old Tongue... well... uhh... it has potential. Unrealised potential.

Esperanto... well to be honest, if I'd been in Zamenhof's place, I'd probably've gone 'lol, accusative case is cool!' too, but that doesn't make it a good feature for an auxlang.

Karen Traviss doesn't write anything worth sparing the fire if things go post-apoctolyptic.

It's great that you found Määda noteworthy! It's my favorite of my conlangs.
I love Sjal. It reminds me of Finnish and Icelandic, two very pretty languages.
Esperanto isn't as terribly annoying to me as it is to some, but it's of little use
Klingon is kinda cool, but the orthography looks like shit.
And Na'vi sounds awesome. Gotta love those ejectives.

äreo wrote:Esperanto isn't as terribly annoying to me as it is to some, but it's of little use

It's the world's most widely spoken conlang.

Åge Kruger wrote:

äreo wrote:Esperanto isn't as terribly annoying to me as it is to some, but it's of little use

It's the world's most widely spoken conlang.

But it isn't every day that you would hear Esperanto-fanatics speaking in a café.

Jacqui wrote:

Åge Kruger wrote:

äreo wrote:Esperanto isn't as terribly annoying to me as it is to some, but it's of little use

It's the world's most widely spoken conlang.

But it isn't every day that you would hear Esperanto-fanatics speaking in a café.

Isn't it a bit silly to point out that the most widely spoken constructed language (with more native speakers, and fluent speakers than many a natural language) is of "little use" whilst taking no head of that criteria when mentioning other constructed languages?

I don't hear Italian spoken every day. Is Italian of little use?

(And, if you go to the right place, whilst not hearing Esperanto everyday, you could certianly do it once a week.)

äreo wrote:Esperanto isn't as terribly annoying to me as it is to some, but it's of little use

Åge Kruger wrote:It's the world's most widely spoken conlang.

how would we ever get along without it
the unspeakable horror

Jacqui wrote:But it isn't every day that you would hear Esperanto-fanatics speaking in a café.

Åge Kruger wrote:Isn't it a bit silly to point out that the most widely spoken constructed language (with more native speakers, and fluent speakers than many a natural language) is of "little use" whilst taking no head of that criteria when mentioning other constructed languages?

How many other conlangs do we hear about that make a pretention to usefullness because of their number of speakers?

And, if you go to the right place, whilst not hearing Esperanto everyday, you could certianly do it once a week.

And, if you go to the right place, you could actually hear some of those natlangs hardly anyone uses. Doesn't change the puny number of speakers.

MrKrov wrote:

Åge Kruger wrote:And, if you go to the right place, whilst not hearing Esperanto everyday, you could certianly do it once a week.

And, if you go to the right place, you could actually hear some of those natlangs hardly anyone uses.

Exactly my point.

MrKrov wrote:Doesn't change the puny number of speakers.

I'm not saying Esperanto is more useful than Spanish or French, or even German. I'm not saying the number of Esperanto speakers is sky-high. I don't speak Esperanto, and I have no desire to do so. But let's give credit where it is due. If usefulness is measured by number of speakers, then in the context of conlangs, Esperanto is the most useful conlang there is. The fact that other enthusiasts (or inventors) of other conlangs don't shout about the number of speakers is neither here no there.

Except it was said to be

of little use

not

of little use compared to other conlangs

so no, it's still not very useful.

Åge Kruger wrote:

MrKrov wrote:

Åge Kruger wrote:And, if you go to the right place, whilst not hearing Esperanto everyday, you could certianly do it once a week.

And, if you go to the right place, you could actually hear some of those natlangs hardly anyone uses.

Exactly my point.

I'm also going to ask how exactly this would lend credence to your 'point'.

MrKrov wrote:Except it was said to be

of little use

not

of little use compared to other conlangs

so no, it's still not very useful.

This thread is called "Other conlangs?", so we're clearly in the context of conlangs. Also, I didn't say it was "very useful", I contested the notion that it was

of little use

.

As for the second, it lends credence to my point because whether or not you hear a language in a café everyday is no indication of its usefulness.