User:WeepingElf

Jörg Rhiemeier

Birth:	December 5, 1969; Lemgo, Germany
Profession:	free-lance artist, independent scholar, futurist, librarian
Natural languages:	German, English and a bit of Latin, French, Spanish and Japanese
My conlangs:	Old Albic and a few others
Favourite other conlangs:	Quenya, Sindarin, Tokana, Silindion, Brithenig, Verdurian and other well-designed naturalistic artlangs
Interests:	progressive rock music, science fiction, writing, future studies, linguistics, history and many others
More information:	Jörg Rhiemeier's home page

Hi, I am Jörg Rhiemeier, the Weeping Elf, founder of the League of Lost Languages and creator of the (currently dormant) UKW World. I have been into worldbuilding since I was about ten; at the same age, I contracted the 'language bug' from my elder brother's Latin school grammar; and when I was about 16 years old, I started my first real conlang which, however, never got far (and was little more than a relex of German with an ill-defined phonology). In the following years, I didn't conlang much, until I started what was later to become Albic in the spring (northern hemisphere) of the year 2000.

My interest in conlangs is actually pretty much an outcrop of my interest in worldbuilding. I have been inventing worlds since the tender age of ten, often together with a cousin of mine; it is only natural, then, that I enjoy reading fantasy and science fiction, and used to play role-playing games for a long time (though I am currently not playing them).

At this time, I have two main worldbuilding projects underway. One is a near-future world influenced by cyberpunk SF but lighter in tone (which, however, doesn't involve any conlangs, only a handful of neologisms), the other is the legendarium associated with the British Elves (in which conlangs, chiefly of the Albic family, feature prominently).

What makes a good conlang? It depends on what it is made for. The kind of languages I am most interested in are fictional human languages, and a good fictional human language ought to resemble a natlang. This is also my personal taste: to me, naturalistic artlangs are beautiful, the more naturalistic, the better. Most non-naturalistic conlangs are rather ugly to my taste, though there are a few I find beautiful for some other reason. (I haven't seen a natlang yet that struck me as ugly. Not even languages with lots of uvulars, ejectives and wicked consonant clusters such as Georgian - which actually doesn't sound harsher than, e.g., Russian.) To me, among the greatest conlangs ever created are Quenya and Sindarin, while I find Klingon rather unappealing. I especially like it when an author invents an entire family of related languages, with sound changes and all that. This is also what I am trying to do with Albic.

I have also made the experience that in conlanging, the amateurs often outshine the professionals. Most conlangs made for movies, TV series, games etc. are little more than relexes of English, and the scripts encountered in such media often merely assign alternative glyphs to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (and the inscriptions seen are often just plain English). Most of the conlangs and conscripts from the CONLANG community are much better than that, even those designed by people who are not professional linguists.

I have made a similar observation regarding auxlangers vs. artlangers. Many auxlang proposals I have seen are linguistically naïve, and the intellectual and linguistic brilliance I have found in many of the artlangs done by CONLANG list members is barely even approached. (Of course, auxlang proposals are usually addressed at non-linguists, and many of the 'interesting' linguistic features found in some artlangs would conflict with the auxlang ideal of easy use and learning. On the other hand, there are auxlangs that are linguistically brilliant.) And then, of course, auxlangers are way too serious about their proposals.

It also seems to me that the 'auxlang race' has already been run - and English is the winner. English is part of the educational canon in most Western and many non-Western countries; it is the language of most of the Internet, and the language most people today take recourse to whenever they assume that the person they are talking to is not of the same native language, etc. p. p. I frankly don't see how any artificial IAL will be able to challenge this position in the forseeable future - not even Esperanto.

Another language-related interest of mine is historical linguistics, especially proposals of long-range relationships such as Nostratic (see Jörg's ideas about Nostratic), and the exploration of the lost world of Old European languages.

What else is important in my life is music. I especially like progressive rock, and would like very much to be in a progressive rock band (however, those grapes are hanging too high for me right now - I need to practice a lot).

You may ask, why 'Weeping Elf'? Well, I have a somewhat Elvish mindset, and the madness of this world quite often makes me weep. That's why.