One of the pitfalls of creating constructed languages (#conlangs) is that even the more experienced members of the community can easily fall into the 'kitchen sink' mentality of trying to fit every recently uncovered cool feature into their language. I am certainly no exception. I have not had a real 'language in progress' for a couple of years because whenever I feel like I have something good, I realize how complicated (=over complicated) I am making it just for the sake it looking 'cool'.
I'm more of an art-langer, that is to say, someone who creates languages less for the linguistic exploration and more for the æsthetics. I have long been a fan of Tony Skaggs' "Alphistian" because it's not only got 50 years of heritage but because it's so fundamentally simple the grammar and morphological rules fits easily on the back of an envelope. It rivals English for its "lack of grammar" and yet it doesn't mean that it's a bad language. In fact, I've striven for the last few years to come up with something in a similar vein without blatantly copying Tony's work. It's harder than it looks.
I can't seem to settle on ideas lately* and I have probably gone through 200 sketches and outlines only to abandon them and start something else. But something clicked this week and I'm currently enjoying a bit of a resurgence in my conlanging! I have a project going I'm calling Norena; and it's a radical rethink of my Fjämsk project (a Scandinavian mishmash language from 2015). I set myself a couple of rules:
1) the language had to be simple enough that it could be useful without needing to wade through pages of notes and grammar to remember how to use it.
2) it had to be æsthetically pleasing and look like a real language.
3) it had to avoid weird orthography and must be type-able on Mac, Windows and phone without strange keyboard apps or fonts.
The results so far are actually meeting my guidelines. I'm using a very Esperanto-ish framework but using forms that look Dan-Nor-Swe derived. I'm basing the vocabulary heavily on Old Norse, and deriving words in my own fashion. It's not supposed to be an auxlang, and it's not a descendent language so I'm not worried about being historical accurate. The result so far pleases me and for the first time in a couple of years I feel like I could develop this one.
So that's me as of early September. My next update (which I hope to be sooner than this one) will expand Norena a bit and give some examples as by then I hope to have ironed out more of the kinks and got it looking more organized.
*I caught Lyme disease in 2013 and although I didn't think so at the time, I am now pretty sure it's caused me some cognitive damage. I struggle a lot more to think things through than I used to, and I seem more unsettled and less confident in my ideas. But that's a topic for a different forum!
