This is several months belated, but I thought I’d toss this up here: A few final observations on the Conlang Seminar I took at Swarthmore this previous semester.
Firstly, some thoughts on the structure of the class: A class like this really does need to be a seminar – that is, to be seminar-sized. In many ways, the class was attempting to be a “conlanger’s workshop”, with lots of peer feedback. In particular, the professor insisted on having a third of the class present the state of their conlang once per week. With 22 people in the class, this meant that there was never much time for actually giving feedback, or for class discussion; rather problematic. I love the idea, it just needed to be limited to 10-12 people to be practical.
Regarding the content of the class: As I said to the professor several times, I was slightly disappointed that the only established conlangs that we looked at in any detail were Esperanto and Klingon. That seems (to me) to be problematic for two reasons: Firstly, that neither of those are languages created by experienced conlangers, and both show many of the hallmarks of first conlangs; second, that they only cover two points of the Gnolli Triangle. Why no engelang on the list? Yes, we talked briefly about Lojban, based entirely on the discussion in Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, but didn’t look at any primary sources for it. I understand the professor’s argument that Esperanto and Klingon are some of the only conlangs with significant secondary source material (with Tolkein’s work as probably the only third), but I still would have preferred more variety. As I suggested to him: If I were to run this course, at least one weeks assignment would be to pick a conlang from somewhere out in the community, and write secondary source material. Go pick some language that interests you, and review it!
Regarding the products of the class: There were some cool languages to come out of this class! Unfortunately, I don’t have documentation on any of them, and don’t really expect any of the students to post documentation. For me, though, the class was a wonderful chance to observe patterns and trends among new conlangers. Most of the class was made up of first-time conlangers – there were only three of us who had done any conlanging before. The new conlangers, in my mind, fell into two observable categories: Those with significant prior linguistic knowledge (which mostly meant seniors – those who’d had the most time to take other linguistics classes) and those who didn’t (mostly underclassmen). Each of these groups, I felt, could be subdivided into more-or-less two groups based on the pattern their conlanging followed.
The new conlangers with less prior linguistic knowledge mostly went what I call the Kitchen Sink Included route. You know the pattern: The conlanger who just looks around at natlangs, picks all their favorite features, and sticks them all into the language, willy-nilly. The resulting languages feel ad hoc, unfocused, experimental. I certainly went through this stage: All of my early drafts of tükwäi (which are many and varied!) look more-or-less like this. And my experience from watching new conlangers in this class and online is that its a very common pattern. And why not? Conlangs are meant to be personal, right? They’re you’re chance to make the perfect language, just for yourself! It’s a perfectly comprehensible mindset; it also (in my mind) very rarely produces conlanging that anyone else would want to spend much time looking at. (And is it just me, or do nearly all conlangers who start with this move on to create a tri-consonantal root morphology language?)
A few of this group of new conlangers went a different route, conditioned by a very similar mindset. These people, rather than focusing on linguistic features that they like, focused on cultural or world-building aspects that they like, and then built conlangs that matched that culture. I call this the Whorfian Utopia pattern – and to be clear, it’s not mutually exclusive with the above (as evidenced, again, by my own early conlanging!). In our seminar, most of these people seemed to follow the Magical Language trope, with languages that either were magic or reflected magical aspects of the universe that they had created. While I firmly believe that good artlanging involves creating languages that give a sense of cultural background, languages that follow this trope too heavily can feel a bit trite, a bit just-so. And, of course, the utopias that they’re created for are always highly personal, making it hard for the conlang to speak to anyone reading about it.
The most common pattern amongst the students with slightly more linguistic background is one that I like to call All the Cases! You know the archetype: The language that has 503 individually-inflected noun cases, each with increasingly complex Latinate names and super-specific uses. Oh, and they’re all fused with the marking for 7 different grammatical numbers, too. (How many times in the history of the Conlang-L have we had “Name that Case” discussions, basically for this purpose?) Of course, it’s not just cases: Tense, aspect, mood, and phoneme inventory are also commonly subject to the same treatment. We had one (really awesome) language in the seminar that did this with phoneme harmony – it had multiple types of both consonant and vowel harmony, each moving in different directions and subject to different restrictions. (It also had every verb mood or aspect known to human kind, and then some.) This pattern, in my mind, is fundamentally similar Kitchen Sink conlanging, except that the conlanger in question has focused in on one particular favorite feature, and really worked on that. The results are usually less grab-bag then Kitchen Sink languages, but there’s still something fundamentally unnatural about them: When you learn about them, you can see all the evidence, right their on the surface, of the time and effort it took the conlanger to come up with all of those Latinate case names.
All of the above patterns mostly apply to people who were doing more-or-less naturalistic artlangs; a small portion of the more linguistically experienced students in the seminar headed the engelang route. In particular, they were all doing what I think of as What If? conlanging: Setting themselves very narrow questions, and then working through languages that answered that question. All conlanging has a bit of What If? to it, in my mind, but engelangers in particular sometimes raise this to be the most important aspect of their conlanging. Conlangs like this can often be summarized by a single sentence: What if English was reduced to only vocabulary derived from Greek? What if a conlang were used as an intermediary step in teaching monolingual English speakers foreign languages? What if there were a German-Spanish creole? All of those are actual examples from our seminar, which produced very interesting languages. Though I’m not much of an engelanger myself, I love seeing these sorts of languages: At their best, they’re perfectly focused, carefully planned, clever throughout. I tend to feel that most good artlangs start with questions like these, but then expand to fill more of the available creative space.
If it sounds like I’ve been a bit hard on my classmates, know that that is not my intention. I loved hearing about most of these languages every week; I loved watching them progress; I was genuinely inspired by many, and thought many others good enough to be worth continued effort. And seriously: This is exactly where first-time conlangers should be. I’m not trying to criticize, only to notice.
In sum: An excellent class. I hope to see many of these conlangs developed further. I would love to run a conlang feedback circle – any takers? 
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