Easy as tu, zel, ci…

Every once in a while, I get confronted by a new fandom. Sometimes I’m just not interested or it all looks like something I’ve heard before. Other times, it will surprise, delight or absorb me.

Tonight, one of the short films at the Boston Sci-fi film festival was ConLang. It’s a funny little romance film and worth watching, but it opened my eyes to a branch of geekdom I was only vaguely aware of before.

I’ve been aware of made-up languages for a long time. Everybody learns at least one simple one as a kid, maybe more than one. I remember learning pig-latin of course. I was exposed to Tolkein’s languages in sixth grade, upon first reading The Hobbit, and exposed to bits of Klingon at around the same time. The idea that someone would actually learn one of these languages well enough to speak it was pretty foreign to me.

In high school I took a brief stab at learning Esperanto (via a correspondence course – this was in the dark days before internet access was common). It wasn’t till college that I met a person who had seriously learned a fake language (Tolkien’s Elvish).

It all seemed very cool. Languages, after all, are interesting. They say something about the culture (or person) that created them. Being able to communicate in a way you couldn’t before is very cool and being able to communicate in a secret way that only a few people know is even cooler.

This same feeling is something that provoked a lot of reading on cryptography, for me, but I guess I never considered the possibility of making my own language out of whole cloth. Other folks, however, have.

The Language Creation Society has archives of articles on how languages are put together, how to play with them and how to build your own. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be playing around on this site for a while.

The language in the title of this post (apart from English), by the way is Uscaniv, a language constructed by Kári Emil Helgason, which was featured in the short film.

There are more nerds in the heaven and the earth than are dreampt of in my philosophy. Hurrah for the geek community.