Book idea: early history of conlanging

[Kuchigakatai]

Hey Mark,

I was having a conversation earlier today about the history of contemporary conlanging and its many online places of presence, prompted by the inquiry of a certain German researcher looking into the conlanging communities (who seems averse to visiting the ZBB for some reason).

Hildegard of Bingen and Tolkien were lonesome outliers, and as much as Tolkien has been an influence on many of today's conlangers, the online spaces do not go back to a project of his. Tolkien seemingly died in 1973 without having presided over others joining him on his Secret Vice. Not much seems to have been inherited from the early modern project of making philosophical languages that categorized the word rationally either (who here has ever even read that stuff? WeepingElf maybe?). These people basically constitute mythology for us.

The history of today's conlanging should really begin with the founding of recent spaces, whether real or online. CONLANG-L and the ZBB are the primary places that come to mind, but what came before them? It would be great if some exploration into the history of these could be carried out, by you with or without others, and put into a book.

The people I was discussing this with mentioned it is actually difficult just how much influence you, in particular, have exerted into what conlanging is today. Several questions worth looking into arise. What exactly existed before or at the dawn of CONLANG-L and Virtual Verduria/the ZBB? Was there such a thing as a Usenet conlanging subgroup from sci.lang? Was it a thing at all to make your own conlangs when playing tabletop games, which seems to be how you got started? What various influences went into your texts, whether the Language Construction Kit or your conworlding and conlanging?

[hwhatting]

I've been making up languages since I was in elementary school (in Germany) in the early 70s, without knowing or even thinking that anyone else did that, long before I heard of Tolkien or D&D (I think I became aware of both at some point around 1980) or found the ZBB (only in 2000). There must have been more people like me, for whom the discovery that other people did the same thing was a revelation, but who had done this decades before the internet.
One example would be this guy, who also was into constructed languages; in "Weltgeist Superstar", which I must have read in the early 80s, he makes use of Sanscrit with a morphology simplified and regularized Esperanto-style; I hadn't known of his language asa'pili before looking him up on Wikipedia right now. There must have been countless people trying to construct auxlangs in order to improve the world.

[xxx]

Conlanging is natural for some humans since the beginning of humanity (I do not think God(s) gave any language to men...) but so few was publicized except... conlangs that became natural...

That is why conlanging exists on the web since the beginning of its democratization... because Internet publicizes everything...and makes from singularities some kinds of communities...

I refer myself to philosophical languages of the XVII, to conlang, since the 70's...
Many of us learned those kind of languages, but more specialized, in sciences (chemistry, math,...), scientific languages would be a more correct name than philosophical, even if in the XVII philosophers and scientists were the same...

I don't know for religion languages... but it's clear that fashion is now to escapism...

[Richard W]

Conlanging is natural for some humans since the beginning of humanity (I do not think God(s) gave any language to men...) but so few was publicized except... conlangs that became natural...

A frequent starting point seems to be be distortions of one's native language like Pig Latin. Some people then try to do something better. An interest in the development of languages can result in people creating entire families of languages. Now, how much does the creation of families depend on being inspired by the Young Grammarians?

[zompist]

The people I was discussing this with mentioned it is actually difficult just how much influence you, in particular, have exerted into what conlanging is today. Several questions worth looking into arise. What exactly existed before or at the dawn of CONLANG-L and Virtual Verduria/the ZBB? Was there such a thing as a Usenet conlanging subgroup from sci.lang? Was it a thing at all to make your own conlangs when playing tabletop games, which seems to be how you got started? What various influences went into your texts, whether the Language Construction Kit or your conworlding and conlanging?

I thought I had responded to this, sorry...

There is a huge and pretty well-documented history of auxlangs... you can get a hint of it by looking at my numbers list. Once I had a set of index cards for auxlangs, and I think there were 500 cards or so.

There were probably loads of people doing fantasy conlangs, but it was hard to know even one person who did so before the Internet.

There wasn't a conlang community on sci.lang, but there was a Usenet newsgroup, alt.language.artificial. There were mailing lists like Conlang and Auxlang. The [url=http://www.zompist.com/resources/index.html]LCK resources page[/quote] has a few of the early resources that were available, but there were more-- Jeffrey Henning's Langmaker is a sad loss since it had a catalog of projects

Somebody needs to get approval to write their dissertation on all this.