In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [101]
In this atmosphere of lively exchange and discussion, some critical standards have emerged. Languages that are too Englishy are frowned upon, as are “kitchen sink” languages or “Frankenlangs,” which just throw together every cool feature the author can think of but don't make sense as a whole. First timers often make the mistake of excitedly trumpeting a great new idea for marking pronouns, or negating sentences, or indicating tense, only to be patiently referred to the hundreds of natural languages that already do it that way. It is much harder to come up with something original than one might think. And while originality is appreciated, it must be backed up by complexity and depth. The most respected languages in the conlang community often have years of work behind them, and may even be attached to whole “conworlds” or “concultures” that help give them coherence and a model “literature.”
It is clear that the upper-echelon active conlangers have a lot of knowledge about a wide range of natural languages. Many critiques of proposed conlang features branch off into lengthy dis-cussions about exotic Australian languages or the sound-change rules of ancient Greek. In the summer of 2007, I attended the second annual Language Creation Conference in Berkeley, where about forty conlangers gathered to give presentations, participate in workshops, and socialize. The technical level of the discussions was sometimes incredibly high; people really knew their stuff. When one presenter began by playing some sound files and asking the audience to guess which languages they were, someone guessed right every time—Breton, Finnish, Navajo.
For these language inventors, language was not an enemy to be tamed or reformed but a muse. And they bowed down before her. Jeff Burke, a tall man who seemed nervous and shy at the podium, explained how he had been inspired to build his own family of “Central Mountain” languages by the incredible beauty he found in Mohawk when he took a course on it in college. He said the language “did something to me,” and he began to dig into the history of the language, becoming a self-taught expert in the development of Mohawk from Proto-Iroquoian. He was also fascinated by Cheyenne and wanted to capture “the spirit of its sounds,” so he studied the development of the language from Proto-Algonquian. His talk didn't focus so much on his own creation as on the real languages that inspired it. He wanted us to understand where his artistic vision had come from. As he went over the complicated details of the Mohawk pronominal system, he spoke softly, but with such love and wonder in his voice that I thought he might burst into tears.
I was energized by the proceedings, reminded of the reason I had gone into linguistics in the first place—my own heart-fluttering fascination with languages. Over the years that visceral feeling had been somewhat dampened by the intellectual focus that an academic track demands. All linguists begin with that spark of love for language, but they sometimes end up so involved in supporting a theory or gathering evidence against someone else's theory that they forget it. Languages become cold bundles of data that they pick through for what they need. There is value in this kind of activity, and sometimes excitement as well, but it rarely inspires delight.
And there was plenty of delight at the conlang conference. One of the most