Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

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Chengjiang
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Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

Post by Chengjiang »

Most of my old conlangs have been in a kind of limbo for some years now. They've gotten minimal further development despite none of them being in a state where they could be considered even grammatically complete. While some of this is due to my being somewhat bad at coining vocabulary, the main reason is that I came to dislike the conworld I'd envisioned for them. The world was very much secondary: Janaharian, Undreve, Luworese, and many others definitely started developing first, and as I realized I needed some cultures to use them and other context for them to exist in I started to build a world. As I continued, though, I both came to like that world's concept less and less and found it hard to further build the languages without radically altering their histories, which were embedded in that world. So I'm strongly tempted at this point to scrap the world and start over, but I have no real replacement in mind. Does anyone else have this situation, of (attempted) naturalistic languages whose world is stillborn or absent? How did you deal with it?

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For reference, here are the most salient features of the world in which my conlangs were to be spoken:
  • It is an Earthlike planet with its own geological and biological history, to which humans are not native.
  • Humans arrived along with some Earth biota in prehistory, perhaps 100,000-500,000 years ago, by unknown means. As far as can be determined, they appeared in several pockets scattered over the planet's land area and radiated outward.
  • The planet's native biosphere had just started to colonize the land when Earthly life appeared, and has been mostly outcompeted on the land. It remains almost totally dominant in the sea. It has the same general chemical basis as we do, but has different nucleic acids in which its genetic information is stored and a slightly different amino acid library. Food webs and biogeochemical cycles can and do cross between native and foreign biota.
  • Human civilization developed at least once before on this planet, attained a quasi-modern level of technology, and was destroyed so thoroughly that the small fraction of humans that survived were reduced to Neolithic cultures. The exact time this happened and the means by which the former global civilization ended are not known.
  • The prior civilization has left some structures that persist to the present day, but it has been long enough that all but the sturdiest materials (e.g. stone, some plastics) have been erased by the elements, and most surviving artifacts are too damaged for their function to be determined.
  • Both because the native biosphere hadn't penetrated the land very far and because the old civilization may have used some of what did exist, this world is much lower in petrochemical resources (oil, coal, natural gas) than Earth. The cultures of the present day have had different and slower technological development as a result.
I came to dislike this setting for the following reasons:
  • Compared to Earth the biosphere is necessarily boring. Most of the terrestrial biota having come through a narrow bottleneck means that biodiversity is very low on land. I can design whatever fun sea creatures I want, but they're inevitably a peripheral part of the setting.
  • I had quite a bit of trouble working out the likely path of technological development if petrochemicals are too rare to be viable fuel sources. I don't think you'd get stasis, but trying to think through it all frustrates me.
  • I've had trouble finding good information about how long various artifacts of a civilization like ours would last if most of the humans were killed.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

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Re: Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

Post by mèþru »

I am willing to adopt orphaned conlangs without their original background for my conworld kårroť. Conlangs with ejectives, aspirates, a relatively small set of voiced consonants, no implosives, simple vowels sets, or any combination of these are particularly welcome. Click languages are not welcome at all (I have no problems with those, but I arbitrarily decided that click languages do not exist on kårroť).
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
kårroť

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Re: Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

Post by hwhatting »

When I was young, I used to do roleplaying with my brother (without knowing that other people were out there who did something similar), and several of my conlangs started as naming languages for the worlds we invented. I also sometimes imported other conlangs that I had come up with into those worlds. I've abandoned all of them, partly because we grew out of the roleplaying, and partly because I'm not content with the methods I used to construct them (the Indo-European conlangs were based on models of IE that I don't longer accept, some of the a posteriori conlangs were bogolangs, some of my earliest conlangs were based on a natlang with the letters shifted up or down the alphabet - you get the picture). So the only conlangs I'm currently working on are the languages of Tarra, chiefly Tautisca. And I've reworked Tautisca several times since I first came up with it almost 30 years ago.

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Re: Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

Post by Chengjiang »

mèþru wrote:I am willing to adopt orphaned conlangs without their original background for my conworld kårroť. Conlangs with ejectives, aspirates, a relatively small set of voiced consonants, no implosives, simple vowels sets, or any combination of these are particularly welcome. Click languages are not welcome at all (I have no problems with those, but I arbitrarily decided that click languages do not exist on kårroť).
I appreciate the offer, but although at the moment I'm not sure what to do with these conlangs I have no intention of giving them away.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

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Re: Orphaned conlangs and abandoning conworlds

Post by Pabappa »

I have two conworlds. The first is "Dark Skies and Spaceships", which I worked on from age 3 to my early 20s, and is mostly about child superheros bouncing around the galaxy defeating armies and huge building-crushing snakes and other dangerous animals and then coming home to their teachers assigning them more missions. On the other hand, they always won, so they were never really in any danger.

See http://www.frathwiki.com/Camia

I abandoned that conworld to create "Teppala", which is a low-tech world in which the human population never gets a bove a few million, and therefore doesnt really change in terms of technology for the entire 36000 years or so that I have m,apped out.

http://www.frathwiki.com/Teppala

The two conowlrds are linked and share all of the same lanhguaghes. Since I deidicate myself to universal canaoninity, all of the events in both stories are linked to each other. Thuis I dont have to abandon any conlangs. I've sort of readpoted my childhood fantasy conworld, and realized that it doesnt "make sense", so Camia is a world where the conlangs dont have to make sense either. eWhjrereaa in Tepppala they do/.
And now Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey with our weather report:
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