Does anyone else create languages for the fun of it?

[K.Hudson]

I'm working on a sort of puzzle, something similar to the Steam game 'Chants of Senaar', and I'm realizing that making up language syntax is actually pretty interesting.
I used to be a Duolingo enthusiast and try to learn a huge variety of languages. I've learned that it doesn't really stay in my brain that way, and that it's better to take my time with one language and then focus on another language, but I haven't really gotten all that involved in learning languages that much lately, due to being busy with other projects.
Even when you scratch the surface of other languages, you get the feel of how different languages use different words to convey a particular meaning in English.
TL; DR, my interest in language quirks has made the idea of language building feel more fun and interesting.
I'm wondering if others enjoy making basic languages, or maybe even the ones far more elaborate than the ones I'm working on?

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

When I was in high school, around the time when I read the Silmarillion for the first time, I took a stab at making a conlang. I didn't get very far beyond words for different types of light, darkness, and love, plus a handful of other words. Some of them did become important names/places in what is now my invented universe, so it was ultimately worthwhile.

 

[pmmg]

When I was younger I played at creating a fantasy language in the hope that I would create a more immersive feel to my wiring, but I wisely abandoned it as...it served more to make the story more difficult to read than it did to immerse, and it was a lot of work for essentially nothing.

In my story world there are a large number of languages floating about, and sometimes they become tricky, but I think I pulled it off...and I did not attempt to invent any of them on paper. I just said, so and so spoke in some language, and the MC could not understand them. OR could as the case may be.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

I didn't explicitly create the language but I use wingdings font for god language in one of my stories.
If it were a more serious story I'd go for something less silly, but it's a comedy first and foremost.
The joke being that god language is entirely uncomprehendable by mortals and it's a funny way to censor words that otherwise would count as swears.
Anything that needs translating is directly translated shortly afterward though, so it's not like the reader is completely blind whenever Wingdings shows up.

 

[Saigonnus]

I think that if it's something that's interesting to you, go for it, but in regards to storytelling, why should I put a gun to the readers' head and force them to learn a new language just to read my book? Most people will put it down if it comes to that. A few words here and there are probably fine, so long as they can understand the context without learning the language. The concept was about a medieval peasant farmer, and retired soldier who is a castaway on a remote area of a different continent. The natives find him washed up on the beach, and he doesn't understand a thing, the point of creating the language in the first place. Once the story get going though; after the natives use an engraving (magic glyph) on him, they can understand each other as if they speak the same language, so largely unnecessary to create more than a few words.

To be honest though; I did go a bit beyond what was strictly necessary. I got a couple dozen nouns, a couple dozen verbs, adjectives, intensifiers, diminutives, the number structure (which is like: 2 hundreds, 3 tens and 8, or 238) In total; perhaps a couple hundred words.

 

[Gurkhal]

Not me. I'm terrible with languages, grammer and all that. At most I may try to cook up some names for people and settlements but that's about as far as I dare to go.


I wish I was good with languages though because there are many languages I would like to have been able to speak and read.

 

[Ban]

Seeing as Tolkien spun a whole genre-defining (subgenre-generating?) world out of his conlangs, you're in wonderful company. Personally, I rather enjoy creating conlangs. Specifically, I enjoy creating Romance and Germanic-derived languages, because that's where my knowledge and interest lies.

 

[Devor]

I did look at creating a conlang for my work, and I ended up creating a few basic rules on how their fairy language works that would be different from ours. It's more than plenty enough to play around with when it's relevant. But, after the rules I moved on. The dictionary is currently at like three words, just whatever I come up with as I'm writing. To me, it's not interesting or fun to just keep going with a dictionary.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I've got 4-5 partial languages going... It all started out as naming languages. It's a form of madness.

 

[Toob Waysider]

I'm working on a sort of puzzle, something similar to the Steam game 'Chants of Senaar', and I'm realizing that making up language syntax is actually pretty interesting.
I used to be a Duolingo enthusiast and try to learn a huge variety of languages. I've learned that it doesn't really stay in my brain that way, and that it's better to take my time with one language and then focus on another language, but I haven't really gotten all that involved in learning languages that much lately, due to being busy with other projects.
Even when you scratch the surface of other languages, you get the feel of how different languages use different words to convey a particular meaning in English.
TL; DR, my interest in language quirks has made the idea of language building feel more fun and interesting.
I'm wondering if others enjoy making basic languages, or maybe even the ones far more elaborate than the ones I'm working on?

When I was writing about a TV Universe, I created a language as a goof, using the surnames of people with connections to Television as the vocabulary. It was known as Televiszh. (My inspiration was Gore Vidal's novel "Myron" in which he replaced the "vulgar" words with the names of the Supreme Court justices at the time.) I no longer dabble in the TV Universe because I didn't have the rights to the established characters and references came off as clunky. But I still build that Televiszh dictionary online. My only guideline is to use words which suggest in sound the original word in English.
Some word examples: "wendt" for all tenses of "go". "aniston" for aspirin. (Inspired by Anacin) "Hartnell" for a coronary (as in heart knell) And in Olde High Televiszh, the full name would be used. So an elephant would be an "alanfunt." What can I say? It keeps me off the streets.