User:WeepingElf
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| Birth: | December 5, 1969; Lemgo, Germany |
| Profession: | free-lance artist, web designer |
| Natural languages: | German, English and a bit of Latin, French, Spanish and Japanese |
| My conlangs: | Albic, Germanech, Pictic, Gobldi Guk |
| Favourite other conlangs: | Quenya, Sindarin, Tokana, Silindion, Brithenig and other well-designed naturalistic conlangs |
| Interests: | progressive rock music, science fiction, writing, roleplaying games, future studies, linguistics, history and many others |
| More information: | |
Hi, I am Jörg Rhiemeier, the Weeping Elf, founder of the League of Lost Languages and creator of the UKW World. I have been into worldbuilding since I was about ten; at the same age, I protracted 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. 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 of course, I also play role-playing games.
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 has its own harsh beauty.) To me, among the greatest conlangs ever created are Quenya and Sindarin, while I find Klingon rather unappealing.
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. Most 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, many of the interesting linguistic features found in artlangs would conflict with the auxlang ideal of easy use and learning.) 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.
What else is important in my life is music. I have recently founded a band wherein I sing and play keyboard. We aspire to be a progressive rock band, but that requires some further practice.
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.
