Why I Conlang

Conlang is the term conlangers use to refer to a "constructed language".
It is the complement of a "natlang" or "natural language".
You may have heard of Esperanto, in the conlang community, Esperanto is referred to as a "auxlang" because the language is trying to bridge gaps and be easy to learn. It tries to be a lingua franca or an auxiliary language.
There are also artlangs, languages which intend to be artistic, and the converse, englangs which intend to be efficient and logical. An example of an englang is lojban, a language based on predicate logic.

Art is to art history as conlanging is to linguistics.
I like the idea of creating a language because it's a challenge. It forces me to think about things in a different way.
Some languages are created to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which contends that our language determines, at least in part, our culture.
Studies have been done that found a native Spanish speaker and a native French speaker will talk to forks differently. A Spanish speaker will talk to the fork as if it were a man and the French will talk to it as if it were a woman. The study concluded that this is because in Spanish, "fork" is a masculine word (tenedor). In French it's a feminine word (fourchette).

When you create a language, you have to decide how to solve certain problems that other languages solve in other ways. For instance, Spanish has only one word for "miscarriage" and "abortion", in both cases the word means "terminated pregnancy" but the difference is whether the "aborto" was intentional or accidental.
Or how a Spanish speaker says "I feel bad" and "I feel heat". One means "I feel as if I'm bad" and the other means "I sense heat". In Spanish this is solved with reflexiveness. They say "me siento mal" for "I feel myself bad" and "siento calor" "I feel heat".


Some people conlang for their books. It is very unlikely that in a fantasy world or on another planet everyone speaks English. So, like J.R.R. Tolkein, they create languages. The linguistic elements of languages in The Lord of the Rings is fascinating. I'll paraphrase a quote the source of which I can't find right now.
"The aesthetics of the language is why Aragorn became king and was renamed Elessar Telcontar instead of a Nazgul becoming king and being renamed Sauron"
Nazgul just sounds evil, Aragorn sounds ancient and Elessar Telcontar sounds regal.
Aesthetics is an important part of a language.

Currently, I'm devoting all my spare time to a conlang I call "thoiteg", I'll be writing a post about that soon.
And when I'm done with thoiteg, I think I will create a language which is based in legal theory- so in my fantasy world everyone understands the law because their language is the law.