As with many young language enthusiasts, when I was younger, I wrote my own Conlang. For those who don’t know, a Conlang is short for “constructed language” i.e. a non-natural language written by a person. I wrote my first draft when I was touring France with my swingband, I then made changes when I was on holiday in Bulgaria, and finally finished it in September of that year (the tour was in July). Because of the influence of friends, the name of my Conlang was “Camwanesh” [kæmvæniʃ] – I think this is the IPA although I am probably wrong. I wanted to make it simple and easy to learn, which it was! It followed common Germanic word order, there were no cases, and relied on word order to get a meaning of subjects, objects, direct objects etc.

It was a fun experience! But writing vocabulary was draining, at one point I ended up just opening several language dictionaries for inspiration and slowly working through. It was, however, a gruelling experience which I did not complete. Because of my love of grammar in language, I thoroughly enjoyed working through and writing that part and I ended up neglecting the vocabulary. I recommend writing your own Conlang to anyone! You can read my overall grammar of Camwanesh here: Camwanesh Grammar Book 1.

Within the linguistic community, there is often controversy over the place of the conlangs, some people argue that they are not pure enough to be considered thinking about, whereas others believe that because it is language from our mind, they should be considered. Personally, I have no problem with them, but I shan’t be doing any more any time soon. I have learned some Esperanto before (as my dictionary post shows), however I did eventually give up with it as I felt that I just wouldn’t use it at all for anything, though I think it is a perfect way for people unsure about languages to start learning because there aren’t any complexities within!

Thanks for reading, it’s a short post today because I wasn’t sure what to write about!