DAMN YOU ZAMENHOF!

Let me begin by declaring my hate for the child of one L. L. Zamenhof. Zamenhof, perhaps better known as Dr. Esperanto is the father of the Language of the same name. What really annoys me is that the layman searching for information on constructed languages will, before finding ANYTHING else, come across something talking about Esperanto. Okay, yes, Esperanto is a conlang, and it is one of the most well know, but it was created to serve as an auxlang. I detest auxlangs (auxiliary languages) because their purpose is to become a Lingua Franca for the world, their purpose is to subvert and replace other languages, they are essentially poorly designed linguistic cancers. Poorly designed because not a one has managed to actually do what it was designed for. Not Esperanto or Lojban or Loglan or any other potential auxlangs that may be hanging about. These are designed with the purpose of replacement, and somehow they end up the best known.

But what about Tolkien? Tolkien was a rather well accomplished conlanger, even building multiple daughter languages from a single mother tongue. Of course many toss Tolkien's work aside as simply a diversion or an amusement. Yes, because it has no true linguistic merit, they're not a real languages, nobody is ever going to use them and they didn't arise naturally. But an auxlang is acceptable because it has ambition, it has an aim to subvert and control, much more noble and acceptable. Moving away from Tolkien there are other things, like Klingon. Klingon has a huge following among linguistically inclined Trek lovers, there was even a mental institution looking for a Klingon translator because they had patients who refused to speak in any language BUT Klingon.

Even with the large conlangs like Tolkien's work or Mark Okrand's Klingon, there is so much more to conlanging that the big world. There is a thriving and growing community of conlangers who are always trying new things. The community I am part of spawns Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist.com and calls the ZBB (ZompistBulletinBoard) home. There are males and females there, people of all ages, from all over the world. And people work on their conlangs and conworlds and ask for opinions or advice, and others offer what they have. From a single native Icelandic speaker there is now an entire group of people learning Icelandic. People here learn languages not necesarily because they'll use them in travel, but because linguistics fascinates them, they want to learn more and expand their understanding and create something new. This is the real community of conlanging, this sense of always learning, always expanding and growing. Always more. Always trying to make something new and more realistic. And it isn't just confined to languages, but I mentioned earlier worlds. Entire planets being created with biologies and cultures and everything created and new, and all of that requires understanding and knowledge.

So if you ever want to know about constructed or artificial languages, don't get caught up in the wiles of Esperanto, because that's just the surface of an entire community of dreamers who want nothing more than to create.