Introduction

Have you ever heard of the words conlang, conlanger, conlanging?

Conlang is a term used for the short form of ‘constructed language’. It was coined in the early 90s with the meaning of ‘a language that has been artificially created.’ Today, we can use it both as a noun and as a verb, which basically means ‘to make a constructed language.’ As for conlanging, I can open-heartedly cite David J. Peterson’s book, The Art of Language Invention. Thus, a conlanger is ‘someone who creates constructed languages.’

A lot of conlangs have been created throughout history for various purposes. Some were created as international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto, Ido, and Volapük while some were created as fictional languages such as Quenya, Dothraki, and Klingon. Now, I’d like to give brief information about some of these conlangs:

• Esperanto

It was created by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist. The creator was born in Białystok, Poland (formerly Russian Empire). The city was culturally diverse, and people had difficulty in communicating with each other. This situatation awakened the idea of creating an easy and neutral language within him, then he created Esperanto. Today, it is the most widely spoken conlang in the world.

• Quenya

It is one of the Elvish languages J. R. R. Tolkien created to use in his legendarium along with Sindarin, Telerin, and others… He was inspired by Finnish, Latin, Greek, and ancient Germenic languages while creating Quenya. Moreover, it is an Elvish language we have the most sources about.

• Dothraki

It was created by David J. Peterson, a linguist to be used in the George R. R. Martin‘s novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and its television adaptation, Game of Thrones for the Dothraki people of the Dothraki Sea. The creator was inspired by Turkish, Russian, Estonian, Inuktitut, and Swahili languages while creating the language. It has been described as the most convincing fictional language since Elvish langauges.

After talking about the concept of conlang in short, I’d like to tell you my own conlang story. Up to now, I’ve worked on 2 conlang projects. One is called Törükçe, which is based on Old Turkic, and the other is called Jembesa, which I’m going to introduce on this blog.

Jembesa is an agglutinating language. You can creat highly long words adding various affixes to the root such as kelmeliudimellattu; ‘with our girlfriends, too?’ If it were a natural language, I could definitely claim that it belonged to the Uralic family like Finnish and Estonian. Since I’m a native speaker of Turkish, you can find also some Altaic features in it. Furthermore, I admire J. R. R. Tolkien and his fictional languages; therefore, I’ve been inspired by them a lot. You can see it if you follow the blog.

Jembesa means magic(al) language. I named it so, because I want it to be a magical language to meet the expressional needs that I cannot find in the languages I speak (such as clusivity, duality etc.) I started this journey as neither a fictional work nor an auxiliary language. It was just to satisfy my linguistic fantasies. Later, it became an addiction. I call it an addiction, because sometimes it may take my whole day just to sit and think about the language. Well, I might complain of this situation a little, but it adds a lot to me. Moreover, I’m really into reading and learning on anything about linguistics, and as my horizon expands, I add the useful features I’ve found to Jembesa in order to make it a rich language.

I started to create it as a personal work (I prefer to use the term of idio- “one’s own” + lang “language” = idiolang), but I opened this blog, and now, I want to share the outcome with you. I hope you like it. 🙂

the Word Formation of JEMBESA

j+: a prefix making new words from suffixes +emp-: -able = jemp-: to be able to +a: nominal suffix = jempa: magic +es-: language suffix [gradation] = jembesa: magic(al) language