Egeslic is just a play-language I've decided to hack on, in the spirit of A Secret Vice by Tolkien (need to find a better link for that; I know I had one but grepping the slogger logs doesn't reveal it).
Requirements and Goals
There are several reasons why, these days, someone would want to create their own language—though the most obvious outstanding reason is for a work of fiction; something I steer clear of. For example, SHE's Language Construction 101 literally says "suppose you want to construct a language that might be of some practical use for communication in your fictional universe" as if all languages are composed entirely for fictional universes.
But even fiction writers have to learn more than a smattering of linguistics to competently create a conlang. Tolkien invented his originally just because of his philological leanings, and that's closer to my personal aims:
- Have a proving ground for phenomicity.
- Exploration of idioms, irregularities, interesting devices, and other constructs that aren't possible to explore merely by twisting English (though it's rather versatile so I should defend my reasoning that I shouldn't just keep coining words in it).
- To learn more about phonology, etymology, and language in general. I'll probably be making a study of English and other languages that I like. As Tolkien found out, it's easier to create a language by evolving it from some archaic primitives. I don't plan on making a whole parent language though.
- To cultivate the suggestion of various proverbs and legends. This is as close to "fictional universe" as I'm going to get, but actually I just want to be more descriptive about our actual past. I'm not entirely sure about the details of this yet, but we'll see if it pans out nicely.
- As art. Art's a pretty wide ranging thing; generally I'd say that it's the mechanism of producing in a medium that allows a pragmatically boundless permutation of expressions a particular object—even if it's an event, as in performance art—that captures some ethos or manifesto of its creator, from the purely emotive level up to the logical and cognitive, but biased towards the former. (See also: discussion on art and ethicality with AaronSw.) In that sense, I think that creating a language can certainly be art, and I hope that this will be.
Notes: Phonology and Constructive Overview
Funny how alv-affr sounds like alv-pal-affr/alv-stop to me, in a similar way to th/v merging. ts for this sound?
Also, langkit's fine, but didn't jcowan mention a better guide somewhere? I thought it was from Le Guin, but actually it was probably on a weblog and I'm not sure she has one. I could probably phenny-msg him about that actually.
Found it via google: Language Construction 101, by Suzette Haden Elgin. @@ Requirements, goals, etc.
(@@ Need an easier way to keep switching between topics. A single line append function would be good.) @@ I wonder if Old English is considered to be agglutinating? Probably certainly not, but the compounding points in that direction.
Toki Pona is kinda phrasally agglutinating, but I clearly need to look up the definition of the term before I make more spuriousities.
On Naming
Languages tend to have names for themselves, though there are probably some exceptions. I'll bet there are plenty that just use the word "language" for themselves, but in any case, I'd like a name for this and it has to sound good, be relevant somehow, and Googlecountable and all that other requirementy jazz.
First up, "egeslic" is not what I've chosen. I didn't invent it—it's a word from Old English meaning "awesome", and I just picked it as a place to take some notes until such a time as I come up with a real name for it. At least the projname problem shouldn't apply as badly here since a) it doesn't really matter when I come up with a name for it, and b) I can come up with something that doesn't have to sound good to the English-tamed ear.
On the other hand at least Egeslic doesn't sound contrived, whereas it seems constructed languages tend to lean that way. Of course I'm hoping to base off of PIE to a great extent, so that should help me to avoid that.
tik, finger (MT)
sp-, wet (MT)
fl-, movement (MT)
How about radicals in a latin script language?