My conlangs bring all the boys to the yard...

Hello, Reader!

I am so glad you showed up. I thought I was going to be all alone here, talking to myself. Again.  I assume you're here because you're interested in constructing languages or languages other people have constructed. Or maybe you know me or know of me, and you're just curious about my hobbies.

My hobbies are awesome, especially this one.


This, of course, is my obligatory introduction post, so I might as well get on with introducing myself. I'm Mia. I've been around the online conlanging community for a good long while, posting as Mia Soderquist, M.S. Soderquist, or more recently as Mia Harper. I tend to sign my posts, "Mia." (Facebook won't let me put "Mia." as my alternate name because it has too many periods in it. Seriously.)

I've been making languages up since I was 19. Before that, I was just a huge fan of natural languages. I was aware of Esperanto and had thought the language bits were the best part of The Lord of the Rings, but it didn't strike me as something I could do... until I did.

My first conlang was called Muhilamanyani. There really wasn't much to it, and I've long since lost the tattered and faded pages that served as its documentation. I only mention it because it was first. That was about 1990.

Later, after a few other failed experiments that didn't even have names, I found the CONLANG list. Inspired by all the cool stuff other people were doing, I decided to scrap everything I'd been doing and to do something that was completely different. The result was ea-luna. I worked very hard on it in the summer and fall of 1996, and it remains my most usable language. There's virtually no real documentation for it beyond the original vocabulary list; it was mostly documented in the form of cryptic notes and examples in the first place, and then most of those, along with the full list of known compound words, have gotten lost over the years. In the last year or so, I've reconstructed and revived ea-luna. It's full of flaws and holes, but I still love it.

After ea-luna, there were a bunch of sketchy projects that reached various states of development before I stopped caring about them. Then, in 2007, I started Teliya Nevashi (or just Nevashi, in English). I had some ideas I wanted to try, and I wanted to try to develop a conlang in a format that would be easier to share with people online. Its been developing very, very slowly in a public way. Nevashi's home online is at nevashi.blogspot.com.

I continue to mess around on the side with potential new languages. There are three main reasons why I start sketching out the beginnings of new projects on a fairly regular basis:

1. I come up with an idea I want to explore more fully that won't fit in the languages I already have lying around.
2. I start to see flaws in the language I am working on, and feel like I can't correct them without losing what I do like about the language.
3. I suddenly feel creative and/or bored and think, "Gee, I could start a new language while I am waiting here for the doctor/banker/pirates!" 

Most of these sketches end up on scraps of paper in the back of my van*, and I never do anything else with them. If I find them while I am looking for something else, I say to myself, "Oh, that was clever!" or "Oh... What was I thinking?" and that's the end of it. 

Now, at least some of the time, those little sketches may end up here, for everyone's amusement. Mainly my amusement, but possibly yours as well.

(* This extremely old, extremely obscure reference included for the sake of one or two oldtimers. I love you guys.)