What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?
Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.
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I dabbled in a bit of neography (creating your own writing system) and a hint of conlanging (creating your own language). I think I've managed to create a fairly decent writing system for myself, but the conlang went nowhere fast as I underestimated the effort required to even get started with it. I also attempted making fantasy maps, but it was all in paper and quite a while ago.
That's it, I suppose: neography, conlanging, and fantasy mapping.
I also spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at maps and making virtual road trips via Google street view, but that's way more mainstream.
Fellow conlanger!
Haha~ Funny that there's two conlangers in this thread.
Three.
Hahaha! That's way more than I expected.
Four actually
That's cool. I would try to get into get into conlangs, but I don't feel strong enough with my linguistic background to try now. The farthest I ever got was creating alternate alpha-characters ages ago in class with a friend.
I have always liked maps and then I found the mapmaking and worldbuilding subreddits a while ago and have always wanted to do that, but I get overwhelmed and unsure where to start. Its one of those ideas I can't shake though so I will probably give it a good shot at some point in my life.
Lack of knowledge in linguistics (or languages in general) is also what stopped my conlang project in its tracks.
As for creating alternate alpha-characters, that's where I got my start. I thought it'd be cool to replace Latin alphabet characters with my own symbols, and things went on from there. Like, I think it's nifty to have a symbol for the 'sh' sound, or I've noticed that I encounter a certain sound combination a lot of times. And then it got kinda out of hand and I decided to simplify things a bit, and then added back more symbols, but with more thought given to it this time around. A few more cycles of that happened over the many years I've worked on my script.
Lack of knowledge in linguistics (or languages in general) is also what stopped my conlang project in its tracks.
Yeah I've had this issue too, but it hasn't stopped me trying. I do try my best to understand the linguistics stuff enough to make sure my language is making sense, but it feels like a never-ending battle as there's always more you can learn and add. I'm kinda fine with that though, and if it weren't for conlanging I wouldn't have realised I was into linguistics and started studying it at university.
Ah, indeed. If I am remembering things correctly, I was like "huh, so there are a lot of things I need to learn about languages in order to pull this off, but where do I start?" I guess I could have just started with what I know, adapting my native language's verb system and fusing it with Esperanto's word-building mechanism, which would have made things really agglutinative with affixes for the verb's tense, mood, and whatnot with roots that can themselves be combinations of simpler roots. Like, I guess ++[ + ... + ]+. However, considering how little I know of the actual machinations of my native language's verb system....
It's also a shame that I was already six years into a five year course when I even had a clue I was into this. Am I just making excuses for myself? Likely. But yeah.
I get that perfect can be the enemy of good (or any progress), and I should probably just start, but I'm aware that I am not that into linguistics and I want to spend my time other places. That's awesome that it helped you figure out what you wanted to do though, that's a huge win.
What's a writing system in this context?
In this context, as in the more ordinary sense, it is a mapping of speech sounds to symbols, usually written, but some others have made systems that make use other things such as color (lights, or pigments) or even 3d-shapes. So, for example, the Latin alphabet is a writing system, but so are the Arabic abjad, the Devanagari abugida, the Mongolian script, the Korean script, Gregg shorthand, as well as Tengwar and Klingon. The last two are considered conscripts (a synonym for neography, in hindsight, I should have used that instead) since they aren't used to write "natural (human) languages".