Tricky Linguistics...

Today, while doing some research for an essay on Macbeth, I discovered this website, an attempt to construct a non-human language, and I was hooked. This person is, beyond all reasonable doubt, my new hero.

I have always been fascinated by languages, and have been constructing them since I was a small child. Even before I began to formally ‘invent’ languages of my own, I would often speak (and still do, very often) in gibberish tongues that tended to annoy everyone around me, especially my parents, who couldn’t ever get a straight answer out of me. I would love to play at speaking foreign languages, from German and French to Sioux and Swahili. It tended to help that I was naturally adept at imitating accents.

My first attempt at creating a ‘language’ (if you could call it that) was a simple code-based set of symbols to replace the letters of the English alphabet. I didn’t work on any grammar, obviously, since I was... I don’t even remember how old.

I have always been obsessed with the fantasy genre, and it is from there that my fascination for constructed languages stemmed. Being born in the mid-90s, I watched The Lord of the Rings films long before I actually read the books, but was fascinated by the various languages presented in the films. This inspired me to create my own proper language. May, many half-heated attempts were made, from when I was about eight, till I was eleven. That was when I actually managed to create a language of any consequence. It was a hieroglyphic language, with hand-drawn symbols representing entire words. I didn’t create a proper grammatical structure, but I did compile a dictionary of about a hundred words. The language itself was crude, and created on whim, rather than on an evolutionary structure as real languages are, and, as I recently discovered while looking through my Class VI school notebooks (in which I had created the language during boring classes), contained words almost always ending in consonant sounds, particularly ‘-r’, which made the language terribly monotonous and tiring to speak. Here’s a sentence in the language (which never had a name): 
Denar raur duku masku dular!

('Give me more money!' Yes, some of those classes were so boring, we used to come up with gangster dialogue.)

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I invented a script top be used in a particular nation in a fantasy land that I had been working on for about two years then (since November 5^th, 2006, to be precise). It was a rune script, created to be chiseled into wood or stone by the ancient settlers, which evolved into the lingua franca of the nation. I decided that I wanted to take this language seriously, and began to invent its words and grammar by translating texts from English. This proved to be extremely successful, and by the end of that school year, I had compiled a dictionary of 269 words. It was around this time that I began to read a lot more Tolkien, which inspired me to seriously consider working hard on my fantasy and its language. Unfortunately, school was starting to become a lot more serious at that point, and my dictionary remained stale at 269 words until very recently (which is ironic, considering this is definitely the most serious stage of my education till date). I had begun to work on my language again, but I will have to take a sabbatical from that area of my life for now.

I had bought a book sometime, called How Language Woks by David Crystal, which I plan to red intensely this summer. I will have to wait another month before I can actually begin to work on my language and my ‘world’, but that makes it all the more exciting. At least I have something to reward myself with after the dreaded board exams.

Maybe, after that, I’ll be able to share my world with you guys right here, on this blog. Fingers crossed!