I just realised yesterday that I haven't made any blog entries in almost a month!

The truth is I haven't been writing :( Instead I've been mulling over all the feedback I've had so far from my fellow writers, and trying to work out what the hell is really going on in my plot! Then December loomed and a zillion and one things to get done before Christmas (making mincemeat for mince pies, choosing and ordering a gas fire so we can be cozy this winter, etc). Eventually I decided that I was way too busy to concentrate on writing, so I've started on a side-project. It's related to my fictional world but not writing as such, so it gets its own section of the blog...

Even before I discovered Tolkien, I was inventing languages. Most of my attempts have fallen by the wayside, but it keeps pulling me back. As a change of pace from my novel, I've decided to work for a while on some languages for a non-human race who probably won't even appear in the first book - but then it's a major task, so needs to be done well ahead of time.

I'll be putting together a new section of this site devoted to language construction, or conlang as it's known amongst its practitioners. I've also just joined a forum started by Mark Rosenfelder, writer of the essential conlang guide "The Language Construction Kit". Through the forum I've discovered that some of the members are planning the conlang equivalent of NaNoWriMo - InCoCreMo, or International Conlang Creation Month! As it's in going to be in January, I'm going to give it a go. The idea is to create a conlang capable of translating the first 3 pages of "The Hobbit" (and, optionally, doing the translation) within the month. I think it'll help me get the conlang bug out of my system and thus free me up to get back to fiction-writing in February. Either that or I'll get so absorbed in it that I start writing a novel, Tolkien-style, about the people who speak the language I've just invented :)

Since I want my conlang to be fairly naturalistic, it needs complexities and irregularities - and rather than just think up "random" irregularities, I'd like them to arise from former regularities. That means I need to come up with the bones of an ancestor language, as well as the current language!

So, I've spent the last day or so working on regular, contextual sound changes that will produce seemingly arbitrary grammatical variants such as declensions. Some of the work I did by hand, painstakingly, but the final stage - parsing the file and outputting English-to-Conlang and Conlang-to-English dictionaries - I did with Perl. Actually the word-to-meaning match is still the random one produced by my original script, but with a two-way "dictionary" I can more quickly look up words and assign new meanings.

Also, yesterday evening I typed up the sample text for InCoCreMo. It's going to be quite a challenge to produce a sufficiently extensive syntax and vocabulary to translate it all - especially into the language of an alien culture which lacks some of the concepts covered in the excerpt, like marriage!

Since my last post, I've been in grave need of a project to distract me, so I'm very glad InCoCreMo came up. Sadly my cat Saturn went missing on Christmas Eve, and by her continued absence we can only assume she was run over :(