Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Notes on Language Creation and Ergativity - http://dedalvs.free.fr/notes.html © David Peterson – [email protected] Notes on Language Creation There is no "How To" book for language creation. Everyone has their own opinions; everyone has good ideas. These are a few of mine (opinions, not good ideas--that's for you to decide). Preface Awhile back, Jeffrey Henning (the man behind Langmaker.com ) suggested I create a kind of "How To" page for my website, perhaps something like his excellent Model Languages newsletters, which you can find here . He suggested I could start off with some of my better CONLANG posts, probably like this one , which someone posted as a resource to Langmaker.com . My first thought upon hearing (well, reading, I guess) this suggestion was: Why? Not because I didn't think that at least some of my CONLANG posts were useful/helpful--I hope they were. My posts on CONLANG , though, are all spur of the moment, and are certainly not meant to be authoritative in any way. I felt like if you added something like a "How To" page, it would presuppose that you were an authority on the subject, and that there's some special reason why people should believe what you say. I don't feel like an authority on conlanging, and I certainly don't want to make it sound as if I think I am. So that was one reason I was hesitant. Another reason was that there are plenty of "How To" sites out there already, such as Pablo David Flores's essay How to Create a Language (warning: that link is to a .pdf), as well as probably the best guide out there, Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit . And, of course, there are always the essays of Rick Morneau (if you're a language creator, or interested in language creation, and are not familiar with these essays, you probably should become familiar with them). Anyway, the point, I suppose, is this: If we've already got the steel-belted radial, why re-invent the stone wheel? Wow, it's kind of hard to argue with the logic of that analogy... But anyway, I did, in fact, decide to create a kind of "How To" page, of which this page is evidence. The main reason I did so is this: There is no authority on language creation. There's barely even a literature. Sure, there are plenty of books that have created languages in them (go here for an ever-growing, yet inexhaustive, list), but there are very few (one?) that actually discuss the creation of language in any depth. Thus, if we, the language creation community, don't discuss our art ourselves, who will? Chances are it'll be an outsider-- - 179 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 someone like Marina Yaguello, who wrote a book whose title is Lunatic Lovers of Languages (thanks for the vote of confidence, Ms. Yaguello). I, for one, don't want that. Additionally, there are as many ways to create a language as there are people to create them. And since chances are that much of our work will be lost if we don't put it somewhere public, the need to at very least catalog your ideas online is vital. I'm continually amazed at not only the ideas of well-established conlangers, but also of those new to the game who've never even had the privilege of being able to discuss their conlangs with a sympathetic audience. Without fresh ideas, new blood, the communal aspect of the artform can't survive, po-moemu . The purpose of this preface is threefold. First, I wanted to explain why this page is on my site, of course. Second, though, is that I'd like to urge the conlangers reading this (well, the conlangers who have webpages) to put up not only their language sketches, cultural descriptions, scripts, artwork, etc., but also their ideas, their thoughts about language creation; what they've learned. Your experience is invaluable: Let us know about it. Oh, there's also a third reason for the preface. I wanted to explain how this notebook will be structured. Unlike an actual "How To" guide, this notebook will not be in sections that build off one another and gradually increase in complexity. In fact, the first content section (not including this preface or the introduction ) is on ergativity --a notoriously sticky subject. So what you should do is just go to the table of contents and see if there's a subject that interests you. If so, click on it, and dive on in. If not, hey, that's life . Try back again some time. I plan to add to this page periodically. Oh, one more thing. There are two types of links on this page. Those that show up in pink but are not italicized go pretty much wherever they say they go. Those that are in pink and are italicized, however, go directly to a linguistic definition of the given term which is hosted on SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms . It's a helpful site, and I've made use of it liberally not only on this page, but on all my pages. All right, that's enough of a preface. I bid you a good day, and hope you can find something useful on this page. Introduction Let me pause while I figure out what this is an introduction to... Ah, yes. This is intended to be a general introduction to me as a language creator, so you can know where I'm coming from. I was never really interested in language the way I am now (and the way most language creators have always been) until my junior year of high school. Before then, I came from a house where English was the first language and Spanish the second, but I never fully - 180 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 learned Spanish. So, when I got to high school, I took Spanish, because everyone had to take a language. It was in my junior year, though, that I woke up one morning with a startling thought: Millions of people on Earth could speak French fluently, and I wasn't one of them. This greatly disturbed me. I was more embarrassed, than anything else. Like I'd walked into a black tie social event in my pajamas (and little-kid footy pajamas, at that). From that day forward, I was determined to learn every language on Earth, living or dead. (Note: It wasn't until much later that I learned that there were thousands of these things, and that I would have to revise my self-imposed goal, if I hoped to live anything that even resembled a normal life.) Shortly after my revelation, I started to pick up different language books here and there. And so, I started to teach myself Latin and French. In my senior year, I added a German class, though I was thwarted in my attempt to take French 2 without having taken French 1. I also started to try to learn Arabic. Then when I go to college at UC Berkeley , I took, in my first year, a year of Arabic, a semester of Russian, and a semester of Esperanto. Esperanto was my official introduction to created languages, though at the time, I never imagined that one even could create a language for fun. That thought didn't dawn on me until my next semester, when I (finally) took a French class, and took my very first linguistics class: Linguistics 5, introductory linguistics. Some time during the lesson on the IPA , I thought to myself, "Hey, what if I came up with my own IPA, so that I could write English in an Arabic-style script?" I'd become enamored of Arabic, and especially its script, you see. And then I had a startingly thought. "What if I actually created a language that was like Arabic, but simple and regular, like Esperanto?" And that was the end of it for me. Ever since that day, just about all my free time has been spent creating languages. That first language was a language called Megdevi , named after myself and my girlfriend at the time. My idea was to create a language that we could speak between ourselves. (What a laugh!) When I realized that wasn't going to pan out, I just started to expand it on my own, adding sounds that I liked, not having to worry about how others could pronounce them any longer. Pretty soon I got some font making software and started creating a font. This led to creating more fonts and more languages. It wasn't until March of 2001, it turns out (I could've sworn it was November...), that I came across the CONLANG list. It looks like my first message was on March 8, 2001, and it was rather argumentative. An ill omen. Oh well. One thing that's important to understand about me and language creation is that I really thought I had come up with a novel idea. I new that Esperanto had been created back in the 19th century, and that a few others had been created around that time (Ido, SolReSol, Novial, Volapük, etc.), but I didn't know that anyone had actually created a language for fun. Ever. I never read Tolkien as a child (I almost got three fourths of the way through The Hobbit once), and still am not fond of him. And even though I knew of him, certainly, I never knew that he created languages.