PERSONAL STATEMENT

Developmental history
Inspirations and influënces
The way I wanted it to be



Back to contents

• Developmental history

One day in eighth grade I decided to make up symbols for all the sounds of English. I didn't do this as some spelling reform or anything silly like that. I just did it as a whim, for fun. I distinctly remember telling someone about it and showing him by drawing with a stick an example in the dirt:

"'' is a 'b,'" I said (well, no, I didn't say "," but you know what I mean), "and '' is an 'ah' sound, so to make, say, the word 'Bob' you'd do something like ',' because the letters connect to each other downward."

I still have no clue what gave me the ideä to make them all connect downward like that, but as far as I can gather no other language does that, so it seems I've hit upon something unique, which is neat, because there are so many languages right now and even more in the past. To come up with a linguistic feature that no other language has ever thought of is, to me, quite amazing.

So anyway, I made symbols for all the sounds of English I could think of, including two that I would later get rid of because they actually aren't single sounds (the "ch" and "j" are really t+sh and d+zh run together, respectively). I also included the "kh" sound which actually does not appear in English but which pretty much everyone knows anyway. The very first version of this script had one general "ah" sound, but every version after that for quite some time made distinctions between the various "ah" forms (such as in calm, box, fought, father, etc.); I could barely even recognize some of the distinctions I made, and only by listening closely, and I doubt I paid attention to them at all when I spoke. Still, it was a fun exercise for me, and I kept the paper I had written it on.

A while later we were given a big project to creäte a culture. I loved this assignment and went about making them the wackiëst, zany culture I could (an interesting side note: they worshiped cheese, and so the first word in my language besides the country's name, and the only word from that period that has continued unadulterated into the version of the language presented here). One part said to make a language for it. I think most people kind of cheated and just made new symbols for English letters and left it at that. I know my sister did. I came up with a few words and redid the alphabet, since I had lost the original paper I wrote it all down on (I found it later, though).

After the project was done I didn't really do much with the language — on paper. I spent a lot of time working on ideäs for the language in a small but constantly running corner of my brain. I'd come up with where and how to place words, what to do about suffixes, and many other concepts that I actually never used or even remembered.

During the beginning months of ninth grade I decided that my personal project would be a machine that would pop ALL the popcorn in any given package, instead of just popping most and leaving some of the little black kernels for you to "discover" with a loud and irritating crunch. I even drew up preliminary plans for such a device. However, I lost the plans when my school binder vanished off the face of the Earth. About that time I decided I didn't want to do the machine for my personal project anyway. I didn't have the money to build it, I didn't know anything about electrical appliances, and I didn't want to know anything about them, either. I don't even care about electrical appliances so long as they don't burn my toast. So that ideä was scratched. In its place came the thought of using my language as a personal project.

I figured this would be an easy task to do, since I already had a lot of the language worked out in my head and pretty much all I would have to do would hone it down a little and make up a bunch of words. I look back on this time and emit a sharp, bitter, cynical laugh. Millions upon millions of problems stood in my way, threatening to block my productivity!

The first problem was to try to make it meet the Areäs of Interaction. This was really hard until I looked at the objectives for them instead of just thinking of them as broad concepts. I decided on Health and Social Education and Homo Faber.
One objective in Health and Social Education is "Makes informed decisions." In doïng this project I had plenty of decisions to make, whether it was over whether a sound should be dental or what case to make the language. Almost all of these decisions were come to by careful thinking about the research I'd done. Almost the entire year I've been complaining in my head about how it kind of stinks that it has to be a research project because then you don't get to come up with as much, but now I'm glad all that research was required. If I hadn't learnt everything I did studying different languages and linguistics in general (as well as taking notes on how people on the Internet presented the languages they made) my language would have been a lot different from how it is now, and I don't think it would have been as good. There would have been a lot of things I wouldn't have even heard of, let alone thought about.
This project, I think, also fits quite nicely into several Homo Faber objectives. The first, "Shows awareness of the development of sciëntific and mathematical thought through time," is apparent in the language's number system. Unlike most languages, which use base ten, the Old Esmic numbers are all base three. Also, instead of having a placeholder system with digits meaning different actual numbers depending on the location, each Old Esmic numeral represents a specific number, no matter what the order of the digits. For example, 1,985 is a completely different number from 5,891, even though they both have the exact same digits. In Old Esmic, however, if you took (for example) the digit meaning eighty-one, the digit meaning nine, and two, er, copies of the digit meaning three, and you put them all together, it would mean ninety-six no matter what the order was.
Another Homo Faber objective is "Shows awareness of the human ability to creäte change and respond to its consequences." That one showed up less in this actual project, but it did appear, and I did learn a lot about linguistic change. I eventually plan on evolving my language into something completely different and yet still related. While I didn't get a chance to do that as part of the project due to time constraints, I still looked into it. Also, even though I didn't incorporate a lot of it into the project, I read a lot of a book on Old English. It's very interesting to see the ways the language has changed over the past thousand years or so. A lot of our words that start with Y used to start with G, as the "soft" form of G back then was Y (as opposed to now, when it's J). The language also involved from a highly inflective language with a very strong case system to the basically word order-based language it is today.
(A side note about the Areäs of Interaction and the project proposal: Mrs. Kawano, who runs the personal project program at Guajome, made sure that every single one of us knew that a project did not fall under Homo Faber just because we made it. Naturally, since I ended up using Homo Faber as one of the requirements in the proposal, I started it out with "It's Homo Faber because I made it." Mrs. Kawano didn't realize I was only kidding and so she wrote "NO" right next to it. Oh well.)

Another problem I ran into was my alphabet. Some of the letters were way too wide and got to be a hassle, and others looked too much like each other, and still other ones looked just plain ugly. I went through and changed a lot of them. Later I changed them again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again. In fact, I’m still not satisfied with it. In the very beginning of my alphabet, way back in eighth grade, the letters were made to be similarly shaped to ones that were made in the same general part of the mouth. In this scheme, for example, the letter B was a long horizontal bar intersected by a shorter vertical bar, while the M was the same but with two vertical bars, and the P had three vertical bars. Eventually I realized this would all be too confusing so I tried to make them all more unique. At this point I’m goïng to stop talking about the changes my alphabet went through because they are really, really boring.

Probably the hardest thing of all was researching it. "How do you research something that is completely fictional?" I thought. After deliberation, I decided I'd study various features of existing languages to see what I could find that would be neat and I could use. I went to two libraries and checked out almost three dozen books on languages, although I only read four of them, and thumbed through five others. I didn't find them to be very helpful, although they were quite fascinating. What I ended up finding more helpful were Internet resources. There were sites devoted to making languages (or "conlanging," as many of them put it), there were sites about various real and invented languages, there were sites about linguistics in general, there were newsgroups, and I soaked them all up. I love the Internet.

• Inspirations and influënces

In doïng this project, I couldn't just make up everything or else it wouldn't be accepted as a research project. I had to borrow or adapt various features, words, etc. from existing languages, be they natural or invented. One of the first places I looked to was my Klingon Dictionary.

The influënce Klingon had on my language was more general and less any one real specific topic. I think the only actual thing I took from it was the concept of having a specific order to the suffixes; without Klingon I wouldn't have ever even thought of it. The main influënce from Klingon I got was the general sense of beïng odd. Klingon is definitely out of the ordinary. It strives to be that. Its whole purpose is, so far as I can tell, completely different from English and other commonly spoken languages, as well as sounding harsh enough to be considered Klingon-sounding. I took that language's spirit of peculiarity and obnoxiousness and transferred it to my own. Or, rather, I tried. I think my language, instead of being strange, clever, and really quirky, ended up being strange, mish-mashed, and irritating.

Many of the other influënces languages had on me weren't so much ideäs they gave me than examples of what not to do. Some of these were things that I, or anyone making a language, would be better off not doïng, such as having the alphabetical order be the same as in English (Klingon does this) or having a difference between capital and lowercase letters (Verdurian does this, although the creätor apologizes for it). Other "things not to do" are perfectly acceptable things to have in a language, but for one reason or another I decided to not do or to do the complete opposite of. For example, Chinese (both dialects, as far as I know) does not have mandatory suffixes or anything for plurality, which is instead indicated by context. I thought it would be fun to have mandatory plural suffixes, as we do in English, but also have mandatory singular and special trial suffixes. The result of this is that every single common noun has a suffix indicating its number.

Another example is articles. Many, many languages don't have articles. I decided to make articles, at least for common nouns, required. I'm not sure of any other language that does that, but hey, my goal was not realism. I did a lot of things in my language that probably no other language does. The syllable structure of it is C(C)VC, which is almost unheard of, and with good reason—it's difficult and frustrating to work with. However, especially when combined with my restrictive phonology, it does help to disguise borrowings. If I didn't tell you you'd probably never guess that "tekhbigbegzhat" came from "They Might Be Giants." I did a lot of borrowings like that, taking things from English and mangling them beyond recognition. Some of them are so far from the original that I can't even tell what they came from.

I think one of the most helpful sites for me was the Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder. It had, among other things, interesting facts about different languages which I used to my advantage. For example, it says "Note that gender need not be simply masculine/feminine. Swahili, for instance, has eight gender classes, none of them masculine/feminine: one is for animals, one for human beings, one for abstract nouns, one forms diminutives, etc." Upon reading this I came up with the ideä for my current gender system. It also gave many extremely helpful links and asked some interesting questions. The phonology section in particular influënced me. Without it I would have no real phonology constraints, I would have no stress rules, and my phoneme system would just end up sounding like English with a few extra sounds I can't really pronounce. The site also linked to an anti-Esperanto page, which, in addition to being quite interesting, gave me the ideä of the ergative-absolutive case system.

• The way I wanted it to be

My plan for this project was a lot cooler than it turned, for various reasons which I explained above, to be. It was still going to be about my language, of course, and it was still going to be a webpage, but it had so much more to it than the final result that I feel I really should talk about it.

It would be divided into different sections: the language, which is where you'd go to learn the language; the statement, which is where this thing would be; and the other things required by either the personal project guidelines or by me (this would have a glossary, the bibliography, the introduction and explanation of the project, and the process journal).

The language splash page would have an image of "Welcome, all ye who wish to learn" written in my language, Old Esmic, and there would be a quick sound file playing when you first went to the splash page of someone saying "Welcome" in OE (but not me—my voice is awful). Once you clicked on it there would be a nice index of the various sections of the language presentation: the introduction, the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, the miscellaneous language information, and the vocabulary. The introduction would be your standard introduction, explaining what my project is about. The phonology page would describe in detail the (surprise) phonology of my language, including the sounds used and the syllable constraints, as well as a brief description of phonetics in general. It would also explain the Roman alphabet transliteration of the language, as my script system does not lend itself to fonts.

The morphology section would explain how words are formed, how they are used, how they are derived from others, and other related things. It would show how to use case properly. It would show the correct conjugation of verbs (which I'm rather proud of, actually, as I've never seen or heard of another language doing it in a way similar to mine). It would show exactly what to do with adjectives. It would, basically, describe in detail the morphology of the language. No surprise there.

The syntax section would be a little more complicated. I haven't quite decided yet exactly how I'd order it, but it would generally go from most simple to most complex. I'd start out with word order in simple sentences and progress all the way on up to complex sentences filled with postpositional phrases and dependent clauses and compound sentences and comparisons and ridiculous things like that.

The miscellaneous section would be things that didn't really fit into any of the other categories, like the set-up of numbers (base-three) and the way the alphabet works. I'd also have in there, just for fun, a little section of quotes and translations.

Closing up the language section would be the vocabulary page. I'd have a database online and you'd be able to search it, or you could choose to view the whole thing if you wanted. It would show the words in English, the Old Esmic transliteration, the Old Esmic alphabet, their parts of speech, their gender if they were nouns, their transitivity if they were verbs, and there would be notes off to the side for any special information about the particular word, mostly usage notes.

Any linguistic terms I used in any part of the site would link to a glossary which would explain them further. It would also, if necessary, point the reader to a different site which would give a better explanation or serve as an example. This planned glossary was the reason I didn't go into greater detail about what the things I was talking about meant.

My personal statement would be online as well. Depending on the length, it could be on one page, two, three, maybe even five. The process journal would also be on the site, organized in a convenient chronological manner. There would also be the bibliography, which would have links to the sites that are listed on it and, for the books, links to appropriate places on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com and such.

If I had enough time I was also thinking of making some pointless Flash animations to help teach the language, although actually they'd just be an excuse for me to screw around with Flash. If I had even more time, which I knew I wouldn't, I wanted to evolve my language into child languages using common and/or likely changes languages tend to go through. In fact, I'm still goïng to do these. I'm just not goïng to be able to have them finished by the time my personal project is due. In fact, I don't know if they'll be finished by the time my senior project is due. I'll keep on plugging, though, and one of these days you'll all hear of me and say, "Didn't I know him? Man, I should've given him a much higher grade on his personal project."