Constructed languages. I rarely see this sentiment expressed even though it was voiced by the very guy who popularized it as a pastime. It’s such a lonely and melancholy hobby. The whole point of a language is to communicate, but we spend our time making languages that will never be used to communicate.
And it’s not like art or music or cooking, where it produces a product that people who aren’t artists or musicians or chefs can enjoy. You pretty much have to know linguistics to appreciate anything other than how the language sounds (phonology and phonetactics) or how it’s written, assuming the creator bothered to make a writing system, which many don’t. So my siblings who were into Irish dancing or marching band got all the attention because people “got” what they were doing and could enjoy it without devoting considerable time to understanding the underlying mechanics of it all, while I toiled away in obscurity digging up scholarly articles on proto indo-european verb conjugations and Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment.
“But early_riser,” I hear you cry, “Lots of people want to learn Klingon or Na’vi or Sindarin. You just have to write stories about your languages and their world that people can enjoy.” But I suck at writing, and it’s not as fun as making languages.
Constructed languages. I rarely see this sentiment expressed even though it was voiced by the very guy who popularized it as a pastime. It’s such a lonely and melancholy hobby. The whole point of a language is to communicate, but we spend our time making languages that will never be used to communicate.
And it’s not like art or music or cooking, where it produces a product that people who aren’t artists or musicians or chefs can enjoy. You pretty much have to know linguistics to appreciate anything other than how the language sounds (phonology and phonetactics) or how it’s written, assuming the creator bothered to make a writing system, which many don’t. So my siblings who were into Irish dancing or marching band got all the attention because people “got” what they were doing and could enjoy it without devoting considerable time to understanding the underlying mechanics of it all, while I toiled away in obscurity digging up scholarly articles on proto indo-european verb conjugations and Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment.
“But early_riser,” I hear you cry, “Lots of people want to learn Klingon or Na’vi or Sindarin. You just have to write stories about your languages and their world that people can enjoy.” But I suck at writing, and it’s not as fun as making languages.