CONLANGS AND MY LANGUAGE JOURNEY

September 25, 2024 - Published

One of my mutuals from Cohost recently reached out to me about Globasa, and hey! You're super cool! But it also reminded me that my language journey has been really confusing and worth writing down somewhere.

While I'm not someone unable to make commitments on important things, I'm notoriously fickle when it comes to my hobbies if I'm not lucky enough to hyperfocus on something, so it's understandable. On a more personal note, yes I'm very aware this is like a glaring sign of neurodivergence, and we're still figuring that out.

Anyway, my point is: days after I posted my Globasa video, I had basically stopped doing anything Globasa. No more interest in studying the grammar, the vocab; no interest in speaking it with people or convincing anyone to learn it.

I was very invested in Globasa's growth, but I lost the energy to partake in it. The same thing happened after I posted the Mini-Linga video. The same thing happened before I even finished the last Ido video.

I did enjoy my time a lot! I just generally have a limited timespan that I'm interested in a particular subject. To be frank, my interest in conlangs has far exceeded this average timespan, possibly because there are so many to choose from.

Since I've essentially only talked about this stuff in-depth on Cohost, I wanted to talk about my WHOLE language journey, largely for my own satisfaction. However, I'll put the most important things upfront first for those less interested in me doing a full infodump.

--WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW--

At this specific second, I'm only committed to 2 languages. I'm committed to learning Japanese, and I'm committed to finishing Dasopya, my conlang. I'm interested in a lot more languages, but these 2 languages alone have put enough on my plate that I can't take on much more in good conscience. I'll talk more about Japanese later on, but Dasopya is essentially my third attempt at creating an auxiliary language for the whole world to use.

If I include work that's been carried over from the last language, I've been working on this language for almost 3 months straight, so support is much appreciated! You can find the main website here, which has all the links along with exclusive material.

I've done multiple small translations in the language and multiple overviews, but note that the language is still only about 80% finished so there still may be minor changes to the existing vocabulary. I'm aiming for about 800 root words, currently hovering a bit over 700. The grammar is basically 95% complete, where only edge cases are really a cause for concern.

If you haven't seen it, Dasopya is a language made to be simple and consistent, with every root word being 2 syllables or less. Each word is based on sound symbolism and existing languages to sound familiar, but are made unrecognizable to avoid favoring speakers of any region, unlike most auxlangs. Despite the relatively small vocabulary, the grammar and compounding rules allow speakers to express anything they need to.

pumi: i songabi tehi sili e legigen!

--HOW IT STARTED--

It might be a little excessive to talk about this much, but it does give some context for later.

In the U.S., most (all?) students are required to take a few years of foreign language. I knew Spanish would be the easy choice, but French was a lot more interesting to me. Frankly, this was probably just because Spanish would be the common choice for most of my classmates, and I like being an annoying contrarian.

Unfortunately, I regretted it pretty quickly because pretty much nothing clicked. This could be for many reasons (I vaguely remember not taking the class very seriously), but it's also a not-so-secret fact that second language classes in the U.S. aren't super successful.

I distinctly remember struggling with accent marks since I never felt they were explained to me properly (and there's like 4!), so I had to search them up on my own, only to more confusion. While I was lucky enough to enjoy the teacher and the general environment, there was very little I took away from the class by the end of the year, and I switched to Spanish the next year.

I remember very little from Spanish class. It felt a lot more like school. Memorize these things, repeat them back, do the homework where you repeat it again, then come to class where you get tested on it.

French class may have been where I ate my first croissant and had an (unfulfilled) promise of a cool class trip to France, but Spanish class was entirely fulfilling a requirement. After finishing Spanish class, I had essentially no interest in these languages again.

--WHERE IT WENT--

From here, most USAmericans never seriously pick up a language again from the statistics I can understand, and I don't think that's much of a surprise! School is an easy way to kill enthusiasm in an otherwise interesting subject.

But for whatever reason, something possessed me to pick up Japanese about a year later, for reasons I won't bother looking for. I've always been a fan of Japanese media, and later most of the culture too, but everyone knew it was a very difficult language to learn.

Either way, about a month later, I gave up not due to the difficulty itself, but because the lack of any speakers to bounce off made it very difficult to practice or keep up motivation.

A few years later, having a French-speaking friend, I guess something in me really wanted to pick up language studies again, because it still felt like a bit of a whim. I tried French again in a decently valiant attempt -- it lasted over a year, even if on and off -- but I burned out yet again.

This was due to a variety of reasons, but a big sentiment by the end was just frustration. I got very tired of the lack of consistency and constant exceptions. This is the ONLY place I will ever officially say this, but this is the ACTUAL reason I began work on Kalibe, later known as Kaliwe. I got annoyed at French!

--THE CONLANG ARC--

Kaliwe was actually an idea in my head for a long time, from multiple points of inspiration. I found English to rather inefficient where many words meant the same thing, and many words could just be derived from existing words by putting them together. I wanted to boil down language to a tiny, simple set of words that could be put together in any way you want.

Now, I never deluded myself into thinking this was a never-before-done concept, but it's actually only recently that I ever found out the actual term for this type of language. Yes, Kaliwe is an a priori oligosynthetic auxlang, but the actual logic behind its creation aligns more perfectly with the classification of being a philosophical language, less in the lines of Toki Pona as an example given by Wikipedia, and more in line with a language like Ro.

And if you read the article on Ro, you'll know that philosophical languages never took off, because they just dooon't really work in practice!

Anyway, during the creation of Kaliwe, I was talking with a friend who brought up Toki Pona because it was the closest equivalent they knew, being a minimalistic conlang. At first I was uninterested, then I realized that being rather out of my depth, more points of reference would be helpful.

Eventually, I finished the language and post it online, to a surprising amount of attention. It's not huge, but I got many comments. Despite this, I still had no idea what to do WITH the language, other than possibly sneak bits of it into my work. Around the same day, I note, "I may learn Toki Pona sometime for similarly nefarious purposes."

Huh! Not the reason I expected when I went back to search.

--BACK TO LANGUAGE LEARNING--

I assume my close proximity with Toki Pona (I'm just gonna keep capitalizing it because I feel like it) was the main reason I decided to "bite the bullet" -- I had already learned half the concepts for research purposes, so I might as well learn the rest.

There were some language-related things that happened during this time (I poked at learning my family's native language, though I'm not sure when I'm spilling what that is), but for the most part, it was just me and my friend learning bits of Toki Pona for months.

I finally had another speaker I could bounce a second language off of! We had resources that were reliable, the language was simple, and I couldn't feel self-conscious about my speech, because I wasn't speaking to a native.

It was a very good experience, but eventually I wanted more. After bouncing between different conlangs, I came to Esperanto.

Esperanto was also very simple and easy to learn, but had way more words and angles of expression, so it would be more of a project. I spent about 1 month with more intense study than Toki Pona and felt very proud of myself by the end, being able to understand almost 50% of every text I read in that short amount of time. I would still have difficulties remembering words when speaking, but it was an unimaginably different experience from my time with natural languages.

By the end of the year, my motivation ran low yet again. A sudden piece of news dropped.

--EUROPE--

My parents invited me to a trip to Europe! This almost came out of nowhere, and we had to prepare in just a few months. As someone several feet deep into languages, I had to figure all that stuff out.

After Esperanto, I had already been building up some affection again for the natural languages I had shaken my fist at just less than a year prior, and now was the time to use what I learned. I spent the months to learn Italian and German, while giving myself a refresher on Spanish and French. And the trip went great!

(link is for a video on a mostly unrelated subject, but is the only public discussion I have on my trip to Europe)

However, after all that I really wanted to settle down and learn a language. For over a year now, I've been The Language Guy to both my friends and family, and more than that, I wanted to prove to myself that I could make the commitment to learn a language all the way through.

No more auxlangs, no more giving up 1 month in, no more indecision. Let's learn a language!

--TO THE PRESENT--

Wow, OK this one is getting long. This is the last section, I promise.

I chose Spanish, and it fell apart in about a month. It was the "correct" choice, the easy one, the one that I should be able to learn. And, well, I did! I'm not amazing at Spanish, but my goal was be conversational, and between my years of schooling, study before the trip, and study after the trip, I was indeed conversational to a very basic degree that could be used with other Spanish speakers, if they spoke slowly enough.

But I just couldn't find that secret sauce, the motivation to learn the language that ran deeper than "because it's easy and useful." So after everything, I chose Japanese.

The majority of my favorite non-USAmerican media is Japanese, I love their food, aesthetics, culture, and yes, I do like anime and manga. Call me a weeb if you want! I will only be slightly offended.

My motivation has waned a few times, but we're almost 5 months into Japanese learning, and I think that's a great achievement already. After so much time with European languages too, it felt nice to sink my teeth into something that was much more foreign, with grammar rules that would take a lot more time for me to learn.

However, there was something bothering me in the back of my head. Japanese, it reminded me a lot of conlangs, the way certain words were constructed. Kind of like Kaliwe...

I was never fully satisfied with Kaliwe. That's why it's called Kaliwe now, is because I updated Kalibe, but I still wasn't happy with this updated version. No, I couldn't make another conlang, it was a bad idea!

...in a feverish rush around 2AM, I wrote a quick outline document. The next day, I almost worked 13 hours straight on Taynmoga.

--I LIED--

I'm not sure how many people know what it's like to work on something for so long, a hobbyist project, without WANTING to. I was essentially compelled by an invisible force. I had to create this. I don't know why. Sometimes I feel something similar with art, but this was so much more intense.

I work on it for over a week, multiple hours a day for most days. The language has just under 450 words. Another 2 weeks: it breaks 450 words, has a 15 page document, a beginner's guide with 10 lessons. I publish it.

Response seems restrained. Then, it's announced that a channel has been added to the Auxlang Discord for it.

Oh, fudge.

It takes me a while to decide what to do with a language I never really wanted to create? But, eventually I decide that the only thing that made sense was to turn it into something I wanted to support. Abandoning it would feel like my month was wasted, and promoting Taynmoga would feel disingenuous.

And so I made Dasopya.

It has some compromises that make it a bit less "neat" from my ideal concept, but in favor of it being a lot more practical, so I'm happy with it for now. I'm really not sure where it'll go, but I hope it grants me that inner peace I've always wanted from creating a conlang I'm satisfied with.

--CONCLUSION--

So yeah, basically I learned French, then Spanish, then Japanese, then French again, then made Kaliwe, then learned Toki Pona, then had a huge conlang spree where I eventually learned Esperanto, then I learned Spanish again, then Italian, then German, then French again, then Spanish again, then Japanese, then I made Taynmoga, then I made Dasopya.

Make sense? Awesome. I had to skip a few parts.