The Results Are In!
Our twtpoll received 38 responses. The question, you might remember, was:
Who has had the most impact/influence/inspiration on you in your own conlanging?
The single person with the most votes was JRR Tolkien with 14; however, the “others” received more votes overall. Here is the raw data:
Other – 15 votes (39%)
JRR Tolkien (Quenya, Sindarin, etc) – 14 votes (37%)
LL Zamenhof (Esperanto) – 5 votes (13%)
John Quijada (Ithkuil) & Sonja Elen Kisa (Toki Pona) – 2 votes each (tie) (5% each)
Marc Okrand (Klingon) – 0 votes
I will admit I cast my one vote for Tolkien.
The comments left by those responding to “other” were the most interesting pieces of information to come out of the poll. There were 13 in all. Some were general:
- No-one has had any significant impact
- various fantasy novels with naming languages, but not Tolkien (haven’t read him)
- No one, really. I just read somewhere that artificial languages existed, and I thought it was a neat thing to do.
Others named persons who were influential. One comment on the previous post said, “I think only to have conlangers here is a bit of an issue. I mean… my philosophy teacher was a big reason for me to start conlanging…” This is exactly why I was so glad we got the following responses to the “other” category:
- Von Wahl (Occidental-Interlingue)
- Suzette Haden Elgin (Láadan)
- Kindaichi Haruhiko, linguist of Japanese
- Farrell Ackerman
- M.A. Foster
- (Latin), ? (?), Elzinga (Tepa)
- Rick Morneau (Latejami)
- David Peterson (Kamakawi)
- Edward Nelson Bridwell
- Jan van Steenbergen for his “historical bogolang” Wenedyk
The links are all my own, and the comments are typed here as they were at the poll. If any links point to the incorrect person, I sincerely apologize. That being said, I was fascinated to find that someone attached to MAD Magazine (Edward Nelson Bridwell) was instrumental in coming up with a “language” for Superman. I was glad to see our own David J. Peterson (or Mr. Dothraki as I like to call him) was mentioned. Suzette Haden Elgin is one conlanger that deserves more mention. All in all, a nice collection of esteemed names, both linguistically and conlanguistically.
Thanks for taking part in the poll! Head over to twtpoll.com/r/nl7r0j to see the colorful graph created by twtpoll from our data.
Catching up…
It’s been awhile since anything new has been posted to the blog (or the library). Mea culpa. I’ve had some enhancements and improvements planned for The Conlanger’s Library and have slowly been working on them, but they’re still not ready for prime-time. Stay tuned. Some of the proposed additions include new navigation, some back-end coding, and a Contact page. As anyone can see, these have not been implemented…yet. I had intended on doing those and making announcements here on the blog, but “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. Those things are still in-the-works, but I wanted to post something to keep the blog and the Library at least marginally up-to-date.
First, several new postings have been made to the Library. Check out the “Most Recent Updates” box at the home page of the Library. These include a new paperback edition of Arika Okrent’s book and two Dothraki postings to the Scientific American online Guest Blog (one by Sai Emrys and David J. Peterson (Mr. Dothraki himself!)).
For those who haven’t followed the blog closely, we’ve had a very interesting conversation between David J. Peterson, myself, and several other posters on the topic of “Fantasy” literature, its past and present.
The Conlanging Librarian is also the official “twitterer” (or is that “tweeter”?) of the Language Creation Society (LCS) at Fiat Lingua, also the title of the upcoming journal the LCS.
So, enjoy the Library, and look forward to a few enhancements in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future.
Fiat lingua!!