Conlang Exchange FAQ

What is the Conlang Exchange scheme?

The Conlang Exchange scheme is a method Anselm Huppenbauer and I devised to help each other make faster progress on our fantasy worlds. A world needs a huge number of different cultures and languages, and each one demands a lot of time before it reaches a stage where it can be fully usable. But it's a lot easier and less time-consuming to work out the future development of a culture if you know what it's like in the present.

We therefore decided to each take the other's most fully developed culture and language and say that a small group of my people somehow arrived in his world, and a small group of his people somehow arrived in mine. I wouldn't be happy with Anselm or anyone else using Arêndron as a language in their world, but instead he put the language through a few centuries of sound changes (just as I did to derive Arêndron from Proto-Ileuran, for example) and then allowed the descendant people – who in that time had naturally changed considerably in cultural identity as well – to make contact with his own cultures. And I did the same with his civilisation, bringing a small group of people to my world and constructing a “descendant” culture and language.

And who are these people?

In my world, it's the Vardiscêans. They arrived by sea on the eastern coast of the continent, but as no-one from Atragam has ever tried to sail east to find out what lies there, nothing is known about the land they came from. The Vardiscêans themselves talk about their mythical homeland of “Alven”. They describe Alven as a paradise on earth, the original home of their gods, but it is possible that behind the mythology lies a certain amount of truth.

I want to emphasise two things: firstly, that the Vardiscêan culture and languages did not come entirely from my own imagination; secondly, that I do not consider myself to have plagiarised. Construction of descendant languages by putting them through sound changes is recognised as a legitimate branch of the art of “conlanging”. It involves a considerable amount of creative input: firstly in constructing the changes and secondly in deciding how the grammar and vocabulary of the language will adjust. It's true that it is more common to choose as an “ancestor” language for this process an existing natural language, but there is no reason why it could not be done with a constructed language as well, with the original creator's permission.

Similar remarks apply to the process of creating a descendant culture. What was given to me was the way these people's society was set up when they first arrived; what I had to decide was how that might change as the years progressed, what events happened through their (long) history, and what individual people were born into the culture and in turn shaped its growth.

Naturally, there is a bonus here for the reader who has taken the time to study both of our cultures, in that he or she will be able to see what has been changed from one to the other, and perhaps even to reconstruct the path taken. But I needed to write this explanation just in case some readers should come across our work by themselves and notice the similarities.

So, are your two “worlds” on the same planet?

Good question. But (as Dale Jacquette noted in Ontology) fictional worlds are not “maximally consistent” in the sense of having a definite answer to every meaningful yes-or-no question. For instance, on what day was Sherlock Holmes born? The author just didn't specify. This is an example where the omission is not deliberate, but such questions can be left unanswerable deliberately: for example, were the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw real or not?

This is how I've chosen to answer the question of what else is on the same planet as Atragam. There must be some other lands that the people of Atragam came from originally, but you simply can't ask what those lands are like. It's possible that Atragam is on the same planet as Anselm's world, but it's also possible that it's on Earth (an Earth imagined as being just like the real one except for having this extra continent). It's possible that the Vardiscêans sailed directly from Anselm's world and that if their descendants were to sail east from Beltar, they would find themselves returning to their homeland. It's also possible that as soon as their ship was out of sight of land, an act of (con-)God transferred them to the surface of a different planet.

This may sound like a cop-out, but in my opinion it's a perfectly valid way of answering the question. I'm interested in describing Atragam, and if you insist on asking questions the people of Atragam don't know the answers to, why should I have any more idea than they have?

But doesn't this involve a chronological inconsistency?

Only if you insist on taking both our worlds as being “parts” of one collaborative project – which they're not. In my world, the Vardiscêans arrived around 1500 years before the establishment of the Arêndron Empire. In all that time there was considerable interbreeding between the two races, so a certain group of people who vanished without trace during a barbarian attack would certainly have counted at least some Vardiscêans among their ancestors. None of that is inconsistent. In Anselm's world, a certain group of people appear on the pages of history at a certain point, and no-one knows where they lived before then; another group sailed off to the west on a voyage of exploration and never came back; and none of that is inconsistent.

Please remember that the purpose of this exchange scheme was simply to help us both increase the number of well-developed cultures and languages we had available to mix and share ideas between. It's the transference of ideas, not that of the people themselves, that's important. If you prefer, you can imagine that the Vardiscêans did not come from Anselm's world at all but just happen to be extremely similar to one of his created cultures; that's also a valid solution. (And it doesn't violate the laws of probability by having two nearly identical cultures arising on different planets – because those planets aren't in the same fictional universe.)

Would you be interested in another conlang exchange – with me, for instance?

Yes, I would, if your culture is well-developed enough and if our ideas turn out to be compatible. (For example, I'm going to have to say no if your culture is one of sapient non-humans or if they rely so heavily on magic that it wouldn't be the same culture without magic. I have nothing against sapient non-humans or magic in fantasy worlds in general, but they're not part of Atragam.) If you want to propose an exchange scheme, just send me an e-mail and tell me about your culture and I will give it consideration.