Every journey begins with inspiration. Something has to move us, make us want to go somewhere or try something new. For me, it began in the fifth grade when the teacher had us scramble popular names from history to see if other students could still figure out what name it was; the catch was that all the scrambled names still had to be pronounceable. So our lists had things like ARMAHAB NOCLIN, THERRIA BAMNUT, and ALEMIA RAREHAT on them. A group of my friends got inspired from that project and began turning everyday words into those scrambled gems. I took it one step further and created a dictionary of those scrambled words, thinking I was making my own language in the process. Os i dah tescennes kiel hist, nad i hogthut i dah a wen gulenaga.
It was the same philosophy behind the time I bought a Dutch dictionary thinking that I could write in Dutch--all I had to do was translate each word in my English sentence into Dutch, right? The finer points of grammar obviously eluded me until I was further along in my language studies.
My scrambled venture may not have been a foray into inventing an actual language, but it did provide a source of constant fascination for me. I loved movies that played with invented languages (or 'constructed languages'); I bought the movie Atlantis solely for the short snippets of Atlantean. I took a Business Writing class just so I could learn shorthand and feel like I was learning code. I-ay ook-tay peaking-say in-ay ig-pay atin-lay ery-vay eriously-say.
Once I started studying linguistics in college, I realized how off the mark I had been with my attempts at learning and creating languages. After I finished my dissertation, I started writing fiction in my (not so) spare time. My fiction required a language unknown to human ears, so I started playing with what I knew about languages, but I realized very quickly how complicated creating a language can be. So I wrote the few sentences I needed and moved on. Well, I thought I moved on until I kept finding myself staring at my spreadsheet that contained all my work on my invented language.
About that time, I was at a social gathering. When a lady found out that I am a linguistics professor, she enthusiastically told me about the time she had a linguistics class that focused on Elvish. I thought that sounded like great fun and so set out to put together a course that would allow me (and, of course, my students) to learn about invented languages and to create mini-languages of our own. That course begins next week.
This blog is (hopefully) going to become a part of the course. I want to see where the class can go and, in the process, where our linguistic imaginations can take us.
