A Journey to Conlanging
It Begins
Language is one of the great joys of humanity. I've been fortunate enough to study several and even moreso to have a group of friends from varied linguistic backgrounds. It's only natural I would see linguistics as a beauty. Like many people my age, I was introduced to Tolkien quite young. I loved The Hobbit and my mother eagerly introduced my to Fellowship assuming I would take to it like a duck to water — but I didn't. I hated it. I hated it so much I put it down midway through chapter three and never picked it up again. I swore off Tolkien, nearly swore of fantasy entirely, and parted from what could have been a very early entry into complex worldbuilding.
I can't honestly tell you what my re-introduction to conlanging was. It may have been jan Misali's Conlang Critic, Star Trek's suite of (admittedly questionably-made) languages, or any number of other things. All I can tell is you is that my capstone project for my 2020-2021 school year was a paper analyzing minimalist langauges like toki pona's potential for international communication, particularly but not exclusively in informal spheres. I had ten or so attempts at conlangs, all artlangs and all abandoned, before I turned eighteen. I was tired. I worked on fanlangs — Hatorian Bajoran, mostly, borrowing the naming convention of a previous attempt at fleshing out the Bajora's language I have since lost track of, but also Baltan of Voltron Force, an oft-forgotten 2011 show nestled in a very awkward position with relation to its predecessors — neither held my interest. I scrapped both often, only to pick them up again when I needed a few words for a fanfic. I had neither the tools nor the education to satisfy myself.
A Curiosity Turns Into an Interest
I had watched Empires SMP when it started coming out, lost interest, and forgotten about it. I picked it up again with the second season, got frustrated with the crossover (I have never been a fan of crossovers in general, and this one irked me something special), and gave up again. I still occasionally chattered about tormenting this or that character with loose friends, but it was truly not a part of my life until, one half-lucid rant about laziness in superhero AUs, I was told to put my money where my mouth was. I thought giving an Empires Scott ice powers was lazy? Do it better. I agreed; I'm a proud person and often too stubborn for my own good.
It was a very bad interpretation of Scott, which may have had something to do with the fact I had not watched Empires in nearly two years. It did have — well, several wonderful consequences, but — one particularly interesting consequence: my friends had begun watched Empires. As any good friend does, I followed them. I had by this time long since held an interest in cohesive worldbuilding and set to cajoling the world into something I could see existing in the pages of a novel. Something interested happened around the time I began to move on to a second POV: my friend, who was watching MythicalSausage, screenshotted some pages of text in a language I didn't recognize, but seemed eerily familiar. I did the sensible thing and googled it. Parf Edhellen returned results.
Oh. Looks like Tolkien had caught up to me after all.
Into the Depths
I did the reasonable thing and promptly began teaching myself Sindarin on dictionaries and abandoned webpages and never, not once, an actual book written by the man himself. Since I was already going patently insane, I decided I may as well make poor financial decisions about it and gradually bought myself J.C. Catford's A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (second edition), a physical copy of The Language Construction Kit (presented here in its abridged, free form), and no less than four textbooks on grammar in various languages. A little more than a year later, I finally started to conlang in earnest.
Naturally, these were somewhat terrible, but they were absolutely useful learning opportunities. I'm now happy to present my newest battery of attempts, brought on by ideas that downright required functional conlangs. Those ideas are long since abandoned in favour of their spawn.