What was your first conlang like?

[YourFace]

I created mine, Sērēdonīn, when I was twelve. It was a cypher of English, so one word in English = one word in Sērēdonīn. Not only that, but it had long and short vowels all over the place, with no pattern, making it almost unspeakable (Even today, after three years, I can't speak it).
This is the last surviving text I have of the language (mainly because it's the only one I have stored digitally rather than on paper), taken from an old picture I had on my DeviantART:

te'e kokōrē ŭkōrē sērēdonī ārēnstĕ te'e farde ārēunterēes sēn āhte'ove. ekluĕ āld ohveta spēk te'e terēditīnal sērēdonīn, kārēhīlā berēalāon ī ferēnārē-sērēdonīn āld kārēalātēlātārēdge ī agārēalā-sērēdonīn.
The map of seradonia consists of the 4 countries seen above. ekluĕ and ohveta speak the traditional seradonian, while Brulion is franco-Seradonian and welridge is anglo-Seradonian.

Try pronouncing that.

[Bristel]

It's not hard to pronounce, really, if I'm reading it correctly.

Kinda Latinesque.

My first conlang was called Lashti, and it was very undeveloped. It was inspired by Japanese, Lakota and Esperanto. (I had just discovered Esperanto at the time)

[ęzo]

[razed and salted]

[Matrix]

Rak thavas kalzuonas hurga Hurga ker Maja endos.
[ɹɾak ˈθavas ˈkalzʷonas ˈhuɹɢa ˈhuɹɢa kɛːɹɾ ˈmad͡ʒa ˈɛndos]

Rak

1SG.POSS

tha-

ORD-

vas

one

kalzuon

create

-as

-ADJ

hurga

language

Hurga

language

ker

of

Maja

Maja

endos.

be

Hurga ker Maja was my first conlang.

Ne yiri ka ra endosion kalzuonge.
[ne ˈjiɹɾi ka ɹɾa ɛndosˈion ˈkalzʷonge]

Ne

ten

yir

year

-i

-PL

ka

3SG.N

ra

1SG

endos

be

-ion

-CONT

kalzuon

create

-ge.

-PAST

I created it when I was 10.

Ka ra kilo jaine yiri kidajge.
[ka ɹɾa ˈkilo ˈd͡ʒai̯ne ˈjiɹɾi ˈkidaʒge]

Ka

3SG.N

ra

1SG

kilo

with

jaine

fifteen

yir

year

-i

-PL

kidaj

work

-ge.

-PAST

I've been working on it for 15 years.

[Zaarin]

My first conlang was called "Celestian." I made it when I was fourteen, and I don't think any of it has survived. But it was a pretty transparent cipher for English, spelled backward and spelled weird with êvýŕï çpèšl ĉāřĭĸŧõŗ ÿ cûđ phíńd--and random use of "y" for every sound possible--substitution of ç for s (French was the only foreign language I was familiar with)--and perhaps most embarrassing, using <ð> for something like /o/.

My first real conlang was variously called "Estain" /ɛʃtaɪn/ or "Ithiri" /ihiri/. It had a basic grammar based on a grievous misunderstanding of Irish and Welsh and a mishmash of Irish, Welsh, Hebrew, Latin, and Algonquian (no idea) vocabulary (mounting to a very respectable 1000+ words) with utterly random phonological changes applied. Back in the day I was fairly proficient in it; now I've done my best to forget it--except that it was a milestone on my conlanging journey.

[Pabappa]

I was conlanging before I knew what to call it. It was a story, set in I think 4208 AD, but possibly 2408 ... i still have the original notebook i used even after more than 20 years. Like Annulled's, it was basically just English as I thought it might appear in another 400 ( or it was 2200? help!) years. But with the kind of knoiwldge one would expect a ten year old with no real linguistic knowledge to have. So my word for "ice" was "ice",. but i pronounced it /IkE/, and so on ... nothing even remotely close to possible. the language went through different stages, getting more realistic as it went, to the point that Im not sure it should reallyt be considered just one language. And of course, when i did get some knowledge of foreign langs, I immediately had diacritic envy , and threw a bunch of useless diacritics onto my language. And i really haventr gotten over that even now as an adult .... i think "Tòd'řóm" is a great placename, for example. But at least now my diacritics have meanings. When I was 11 my conlang's word for "thanks" was "xænçæ" or something, and there was a sentence in a story about a boy hero who saves the world from evil man eating pumpkins "Tù superi šjèntifa!" you probably get the pioiunt. actually ther emight be some diacritics that didnt survive the 20 years of copying from one compute rto the next.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

Xihu - jopo - boxi , " Ryan " ; xijuvo - tuhe : .
[ʃihu fe θopo fe boʃi va te rɑɪɑn te to ʃiθuvo fe tuhe θi ma]
me - belong - name NOUN.SEPARATOR Ryan END.OF.NOUNS present - be END.OF.VERBS END.OF.SENTENCE

I was in year 7 in 1998. The words were randomly produced on my Apple //e, given the parameters. For some reason, I had the idea that it would be cool to have all the nouns first, then all the verbs. I was doing Japanese, but I don't think I realised that already was SOV.

[WeepingElf]

This.

[Nortaneous]

Latin with /K K\/ and words from Icelandic. The person-marking affixes were -n -š -t because I thought all languages had something along those lines, because Hungarian and Latin. Also, embedded clauses were delimited by the words /l= r=/.

[Pole, the]

[Hallow XIII]

Bad Latin with an unsatisfyingly regular and agglutinative verbal system. Also written in an eclectic superset of the latin alphabet, with a runic version to simulate ~native orthography~ that I forgot to document so I can't decipher it myself anymore.

Oh yeah also in excessive simulation of Ancient Greek I tended to glue words together with apostrophes in writing, because """vowel contraction""".
EDIT: and, looking at this, probably also because CLITICS!!!!. Would explain why all those demonstratives are stuck to the content words.

SAMPLE:

D'a vīrm feāvate: “Eō a tāþ ra'éht; nai kirō i-sāl. D'a'raú'rafaíltai þórēor, nai da ná'ira tiéllû mon.”

Za'íra vīrm īon kafeāltal, ōron a ténnrir tennaíran hāvate d'a vūrmaron elávate. Vūrmarou támiru'þō vegállvate da tennaíran baílu'teínntaroi haránnvate; īþ'ālmat aneálvate féas'īþ:

“Mal mon íra móra, a óra'Naīrþe na'íra kīroita. Ash léash'teínntorim nai vaásæiþ ánira kíryu.”

Vīrm a lilléai'þon bitrívate hālut. Aþ kīvate ē órjashta teínntiroi Naírþet.

[Birdlang]

My first language looked like this
Ahmee kookoosnahkeej meejkuhmtoov glahyaynoh wearchikin vawkawnee. Pronounced like it would be in English.
ƨë̡̱̝̠̲̟̜̠̝̜̆̉̆̆̈̆̇ɬ̇̇̇̇̇̆̈̈̈̈̈ʫʖǛǜ RĄzǖǖưưƲƳƷƸƻƺǠ!sg#aƮƪǚǚǙǙȆȭșdzșȭDzȃȫȆȭȭȆȰȯdzȉȌǴȆǠ was what another looked like. That was pronounced like who knows what because I only remember one word having a k with a bunch of circumflexes having that letter pronounced as a simultaneously ingressive and egressive click. I also remember this sentence being pronounced ʘɫɬɪɯɯʀɖɕɮ ʁɰɭʫʬʪʘʫʀʔʫʬʕɯɧʀ̩̃ːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːːga̠̠̠ Yes that was a sub apical a.

[opipik]

I don't remember any early conlang, but one of the words I remember was "Kalmionc", a placename, pronounced /kalmionts/.

And one of my more serious attempts to do a conlang had these words (that's the only thing I remember besides it had a word ending with 5 ť) : "ťeť, puona," pronounced /cec, puona/.

[Travis B.]

My first conlang was an auxlang, a West Germanic interlanguage combining the most common features of West Germanic languages while not including more outlying features (e.g. it didn't include many features specific to English, while it was Low rather than High, etc.). I gave up on it when I realized I didn't know enough about Common West Germanic to make a coherent language based on it. (I have since lost any information beyond that on it, since the machine my files were stored on got stolen.)

[Ser]

Bad Latin with an unsatisfyingly regular and agglutinative verbal system.

Same here, but with Japanese phonotactics.

Most of its info worked out was lost, but I still have a phonemic inventory and a list of inflectional and derivational suffixes, plus a few correlatives...

[Abi]

Read wikipedia article on conlanging, hooked ever since. Immediately I tried to make one, I loved the concept of a personal language. I made a list of all my favourite "sounds" and I remember it being about 12-13 phonemes (one of them was [k͜v]). I then made my own alphabet with a 1-1 phoneme correspondence. In retrospect the letters looked very proto-phonetian. I didn't have any grammar at all, I made about 100 words into it. I stopped when I realized "winter" and "complex cat" were homophones, I thought what an utter failure the language was and abandoned it. The next day I started a new one and ~6 years later I'm still going at it.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

My first language was an earlier version of Bearlandic. I made the first few words when I was like six years old, but didn't start thinking about grammar until I was twelve. During the year or so after that I made several revisions before I finally ended up with a grammar I am happy with, though part of the lexicon still has to be revised.

[vokzhen]

The first notes I've been able to find are dating 2010, though from what I remember it should have started a couple years before that. At first it was a mess of phonological oddities, including the noob-y /ks/ as a unitary phoneme and quite a few off-the-wall sounds (like /!/ and voiceless /r/) because those possibilities were new and interesting. Without having any idea about how to really derive similarities, made a slightly less obvious-new-conlanger sister language, except that it had an apicodental-laminoalveolar distinction in both /s θ/ and a unitary /Xs/ from the first one's /ks/. They both started out as agglutinative, and then became verb-initial and then ergative as well, though the grammar was extremely sparse. They were both shelved without much work being done on them after I took a different one more in-depth, which was further shelved after a one-off naming language for a D&D world ended up being more interesting. They've not been abandoned, though, just I have a lot of other stuff I'd rather do right now.

Another of my early ones involved a bidental percussive as a suprasegmental, which as far as nooby things go I think it's still an interesting concept.

[KathTheDragon]

My first conlang wasn't actually that bad. Sure, it was engineered to a degree that I don't like nowadays, but it wasn't a cipher, nor was the vocab too contrived. I had a vague working knowledge of Latin and Ancient Egyptian grammars, so I based it off those, and did a priori vocab. It has since been mostly revamped, though, to give it a history, and some more flavour.

[finlay]

Oh jeez, I think it was Flingot, so named because the word for language was lingot and then I added F to stand for my name. It had pseudo European vocabulary, sometimes taken from other languages but mostly derived from English. A lot of the time, the words were backwards from English or were anagrams, like hello was lleho.

I was around 14 at the time - I probably started when I was 13 but I'm not sure. I didn't discover the lck and the zbb until I was maybe 15 or 16 and I'd sort of given up on Flingot. Anyway at around the same time, I was learning about case in German, and then I took Latin at school, so you can perhaps guess what ended up in my language. I ended up with table upon table for different case and verbal inflection paradigms, far too many to keep track of. Unfortunately I've lost most of the main notebooks I was using and now only have snippets. I know for a fact that I imported some of the case paradigms wholesale from Latin. Except the genitive case was always 'x, which was based on English 's, and pronounced ks.

I went to town a bit on the pronunciation. I pretty much invented some characters that I'd never seen before for the pronunciation, like a t with two crosses that was my main way of writing /T/. Most of the digraphs and so on were based on English, like ai for /ei/. There is actually a note somewhere saying that both any possible pronunciation and any possible character are to be included in Flingot. Q, c and k all stood for /k/, and I used q a lot because it looked exotic. I came up with a few really elaborate words. I'm still proud of ṁȧı̣ŧøñíǐ, a monstrosity that was pronounced məʔaiʔθɶŋaiar in IPA. It meant "molecular structure". The dots above the letters meant a following glottal stop, the dot below the i meant that it should be part of the previous diphthong and hence before the glottal stop, and I don't know why i with a caron was /ar/, but I think it was a curveball. (If only I'd known about ejectives) Many of my letters were pronounced strangely, like ä was /oi/ and å was /E/. I was working with only what I had, after all, and what IPA I knew at the time (almost enough to make that transcription above) was learned from my German dictionary. I also tried to experiment with "new" pronunciations. If I'd known how to make clicks I would've certainly put them in. As it is, i made a "glucking" sound in my throat and put that in - I think it was a uvular implosive - but I couldn't connect it to a vowel, so I just made it a word by itself. It meant aeroplane.

Anyway I started translating a Tintin book, but I got to about page ten before realizing that I wasn't being consistent with my vocabulary, and was just turning the English into Flingot-sounding gibberish. I'd also revised the language to include more rigid declensions at around the same time, so I went back and started again. That time I only got to about page 3.

My first conlang post-ZBB was Fhirstöyem, transparently a pun on first, but fh was bilabial. Through the LCK, I learned about the IPA, and different cases to before, but I think I took a line by zompist that low and back vowels sounded "harsh" too literally and decided not to include them - except that I kept forgetting and putting a and o in words anyway. I then put in only ã and õ, nasalized versions. Its declensions and conjugations were much more frightening than Flingot, as I had ten cases, three numbers and at least six paradigms. It was OSV and ergative. I got bored of it fairly quickly, and never translated anything substantial into it. I think I maybe did a Babel text, but I think I actually got as far as the interlinear and couldn't get my head around it.

After that, we get into conlangs that I still have and sometimes use. Panceor was my main for a while, after I made it in 2004. I still have it and recently revised the grammar explanation completely to be more consistent and understandable. I had a kind of conlanging dry spell during university and took it up again after I left and suddenly had a lot of free time, in 2010 or so. My first at that time was Yaufulti, originally Yaufułti, which was made originally as part of a speed-langing challenge on here. It's been revised to hell and back since then, but it's now my main. I had Sentalian, which I worked on a lot during 2011, but I came to decide ultimately that it was ugly. Its main purpose was to be a language with many dialects, so I had names like Kanteian and Rempocian floating around. When I was doing it regularly, I could take a sentence of Sentalian and change it into the six or so dialects without consulting my guides. I have one more conlang that I can translate something into, which is Umpát - although its vocabulary is small. It was also originally part of a speed challenge.

Anyway I've been trying with Yaufulti to move to head-marking, but I've never quite managed to get away from cases. Using them just reminds me of those giant tables from my first conlangs. Panceor and Umpat are isolating, and use prepositions instead, but they seem to be an exception.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

Finlay, how do you pronounce "lleho"? When I first started speaking English words backwards, I used (my version of) the lateral fricative for the double l, but nowadays I'm lazy and just use the palatal lateral.

[Pabappa]

I think Panceor is still there on the "Help your conlang fluency" thread, although I cant find that thread and the Search function doesnt seem to br working. Maybe it got pruned. But anyway, I liked what I saw of that language.

Hopefully this is just tewmporary, but Search by word seems to be compoletely bropekn rtight now. It says "fluency" is too common a word to search for and seems to ignore all but the last word of the query string anyway. actually, i found it via google: viewtopic.php?t=35379 . Maybe the search box reeally does ignore "fluency" because almost every post on that thread contains it. That'd be perverse, because it'd make every popular thread impossib le to find, but its believable.

[finlay]

Finlay, how do you pronounce "lleho"? When I first started speaking English words backwards, I used (my version of) the lateral fricative for the double l, but nowadays I'm lazy and just use the palatal lateral.

/leho/ (my knowledge of sounds that weren't in English, French or German was quite limited)

I forgot to mention that I came up with a Cyrillic and Greek pronunciation guide for Flingot, as I'd been curious enough to find a book about those as well, although by Cyrillic I mean just the Russian alphabet, not the great expanse of weird and wonderful characters that are used across Siberia and the former USSR.

And yeah I still occasionally use Panceor, so it'll be there on the fluency thread (not right at the beginning, but within the first ten pages you should be able to find it).

[Lambuzhao]

My first attempt at a more-than-just-naming conlang was called Wushnikaak. It was essentially a vowel-only language. I think it was also sing-sung as well (read: tones and/or pitch accent). Later, it did acquire some kind of glottal something and a kind of rhotic (but I didn't know what exactly to call them; I was 10 or 11). I wrote it in Roman Alphabet, but also a sort of scrawled, Estruscanesque
alphabet, whose key I have also lost over time

My next attempt, Rozwi, sounds a lot like KathAveara's initial experience:

My first conlang wasn't actually that bad. Sure, it was engineered to a degree that I don't like nowadays, but it wasn't a cipher, nor was the vocab too contrived. I had a vague working knowledge of Latin and Ancient Egyptian grammars, so I based it off those, and did a priori vocab. It has since been mostly revamped, though, to give it a history, and some more flavour.

In mine there are pepperings of Chinese, Arabic. The orthography is a kind of cursive Persian cuneiform. Rozwi sports a number of triliterals running loose, and it is rife with apophony, declensional and conjugational suffixing (though not on ADJs), and a funny little prefix /zor/ which took me years to nail down as a causative/inchoative/transitivizing marker. Rozwi has been through a couple of major changes in grammar and syntax, but, like an old jalopy you never tire of and can never stop finding new things to tinker with, Rozwi is still my go-to conlang.

Soon after Rozwi came her sisterlangs, which I have developed to a greater (Kwijin, Yauchuan, Hwa-An), or to a much lesser degree (Mapada, Oshche, Okei, Reghe, Orou).

After that came Sadraas, which is more or less an extremely close cousin (Ingvaeonic, in fact) to Travis B's first experience:

My first conlang was an auxlang, a West Germanic interlanguage combining the most common features of West Germanic languages while not including more outlying features (e.g. it didn't include many features specific to English, while it was Low rather than High, etc.).

Hooray for zonelangs!

Soon after came Çedara, which I could sum up in two words, but don't have to, because Hallow XIII already has done so quite succinctly-

Bad Latin

Whenever I see/read someone else's Romlang, I roll out Çedara for a spin with those famous Correllian words of encouragment "C'mon baby, hold together".

[Das Baron]

I only dimly recall my first conlang. I remember it was a blatant Quenya-clone, but nothing else. The oldest conlang I still have the files for was called Galáthir. It wasn't just a Quenya-clone, it threw in a lot of Sindarin as well. Originality!

The nominal and verbal inflections were invented on the spot as I needed them with no historical basis. So, for example, the definite article was the following:

Masculine: ei(n) [singular], eith [plural]
Feminine: i(n), ith
Neuter: a(n), ath

No idea why the vowels are different in each form, except that I thought it was pretty. The parentheses indicated the type of consonant mutation triggered.

Nouns had four numbers: singular, "regular" plural, and two partitives, called "partitive singular" and "partitive plural" for some reason. The singular form apparently implied "some amount", while the plural implied "some number". This is the only place that mentions the partitive forms. Verbs apparently take no partitive agreements, nor do irregular words list partitive forms. The cases were nominative, accusative, possessive, and genitive. The last two could've been combined; there wasn't any real reason for making them separate except that I didn't fully understand the genitive at the time. No dative, no idea how I treated indirect objects. The section on prepositions mentions a dative case, but gives no rules.

Reading through the grammar, at this point I realize that for some reason I randomly marked some stressed vowels with an acute accent. No idea why. According to the phonology section, "some suffixes may change the stress," but this was apparently determined by my whims.

Adjectives followed the noun they modified. For some reason I specifically emphasized that verbal participles followed the noun. The comparative and superlative suffixes show no continuity between gender forms. Thus, the masculine comparative is -at, the feminine is -as, and the neuter is -ra. Why?

The verb was conjugated for the following forms:

Simple: present, past, future
Continuous: present, past, future
Subjunctive: present, past
Imperative: 1st person plural, 2nd person singular/plural
Participles: "present active", "past active", "past" (apparently "past active" was a perfect participle "having Xed" and "past" corresponded to English "Xed/Xen")
Gerund

There were various other periphrastic forms, which were indicated by various separate words. For example, the optative was marked with the particle ai: Ai que loccóni venne cela esse ce "May it be an evening star shines down upon you."

I remember that the concept of modal verbs (e.g. English "can", "could", "will", "would", etc.) massively confused me at the time, so I simply created a word for each since I couldn't figure out any other way of doing it.

Every English preposition was translated with a randomly created word.

Word-order was exactly as in English, with the exception that adjectives follow the noun. I did write that the case prepositions (e.g. accusative o) allowed freer word-order, but I clearly preferred the English way of doing things.

Derivational morphology was confined to copying English affixes.