Second senior project reflection
I seem to be losing momentum. Then again, that’s probably just because it’s the weekend. My work ethic always gets shot on the weekends. Waking up at eleven AM can’t help, but I have to make up for the sleep I lose during the week and I think it’s an acceptable tradeoff: some productivity for my sanity and health. My involvement with conlangery has mostly been passive this weekend - lurking on the ZBB without participating, etc. I’ve gotten some good ideas. In particular, I’ve gotten pointers to some excellent resources on noun incorporation, which I’m particularly interested in using and which Describing Morphosyntax only mentions very briefly.
However! I spent most of Saturday at the conlangers’ meetup in Golden Gate Park. I met up with some old ZBBer friends (saizai, Twpsyn Pentref, lelandpaul, and Alex Fink whose username no one can remember) and some new ones (lightflake, mirazai, nakala_valeran, and special guest speaker Nuntar all the way from Britain!). Interspersed with the picnicking and the grass fights we showed off our conlangs and concultures to each other, and it was truly exciting. It’s always fun to see what other conlangers are doing, especially when they can explain it to you in person and you’re not just reading it off the ZBB. We’re mostly artlangers (we conlang for aesthetic pleasure), and it’s interesting to see everyone’s different aesthetic sense. For example, I’m sure a lot of people would find Tlharithad’s sound system ugly as all hell. But that’s okay, because I wasn’t going for a soft, Tolkien-Elvishy sound with loads of l’s and r’s. I wanted something that you could put some punch into, and I think I got it.
Working alone has been interesting. I didn’t really have any expectations of what it would be like, so I can’t speak to whether it’s different or the same as I expected. But it’s definitely been good. I do have human contact. Plenty of it, in fact, especially because I’m at school all day every day. (I have three APs and a restrictive carpool schedule, so it’s just easier to maintain normal school hours.) But working alone isn’t particularly ‘lonely’, and is actually really productive, because I’m very introverted anyway. I enjoy getting really deeply into something by myself, and I don’t starve for social interaction.
I get asked a lot why I conlang in the first place. I don’t really have a ‘good’ answer to that question. I just do, because I can and because it intrinsically interests me. This is also why I pursue biology - it just interests me. Linguistics is a fascinating field that most laypeople know almost nothing about, so I think it gets underrated a lot. And I like to think of conlanging as ‘applied linguistics’, though admittedly that’s less true for my conlang. Because I’m not really planning to do anything with my conlang besides use it personally, I am free to follow or break linguistic universals, and base its grammar on natural languages or make up features entirely out of thin air. The term ‘applied linguistics’ applies most to engineered languages or engelangs, which aim to push (or completely rend) the envelope of human language in a certain way. That requires intimate knowledge of many areas of linguistics, far beyond what I know now. So while I’m theoretically interested in engelanging, I can’t do it yet.
However! I spent most of Saturday at the conlangers’ meetup in Golden Gate Park. I met up with some old ZBBer friends (saizai, Twpsyn Pentref, lelandpaul, and Alex Fink whose username no one can remember) and some new ones (lightflake, mirazai, nakala_valeran, and special guest speaker Nuntar all the way from Britain!). Interspersed with the picnicking and the grass fights we showed off our conlangs and concultures to each other, and it was truly exciting. It’s always fun to see what other conlangers are doing, especially when they can explain it to you in person and you’re not just reading it off the ZBB. We’re mostly artlangers (we conlang for aesthetic pleasure), and it’s interesting to see everyone’s different aesthetic sense. For example, I’m sure a lot of people would find Tlharithad’s sound system ugly as all hell. But that’s okay, because I wasn’t going for a soft, Tolkien-Elvishy sound with loads of l’s and r’s. I wanted something that you could put some punch into, and I think I got it.
Working alone has been interesting. I didn’t really have any expectations of what it would be like, so I can’t speak to whether it’s different or the same as I expected. But it’s definitely been good. I do have human contact. Plenty of it, in fact, especially because I’m at school all day every day. (I have three APs and a restrictive carpool schedule, so it’s just easier to maintain normal school hours.) But working alone isn’t particularly ‘lonely’, and is actually really productive, because I’m very introverted anyway. I enjoy getting really deeply into something by myself, and I don’t starve for social interaction.
I get asked a lot why I conlang in the first place. I don’t really have a ‘good’ answer to that question. I just do, because I can and because it intrinsically interests me. This is also why I pursue biology - it just interests me. Linguistics is a fascinating field that most laypeople know almost nothing about, so I think it gets underrated a lot. And I like to think of conlanging as ‘applied linguistics’, though admittedly that’s less true for my conlang. Because I’m not really planning to do anything with my conlang besides use it personally, I am free to follow or break linguistic universals, and base its grammar on natural languages or make up features entirely out of thin air. The term ‘applied linguistics’ applies most to engineered languages or engelangs, which aim to push (or completely rend) the envelope of human language in a certain way. That requires intimate knowledge of many areas of linguistics, far beyond what I know now. So while I’m theoretically interested in engelanging, I can’t do it yet.