Conlangers' fluency in their own conlangs

Jim Henry
jimhenry@pobox.com
21 March 2009
Third Language Creation Conference

I've promised Rick Harrison an article on this subject, which will cover everything in my talk and probably more, for his zine Invented Languages. The text of this article, and the detailed analysis of my survey results, will not appear on my website until a year after they appear in print. Anonymized raw survey data will appear on my website at some point. Here I give the references and footnotes for my talk and the eventual article.

  1. "Conlang Fluency Survey". The introduction and questions from my survey, in the same form as it was posted to the CONLANG list, Zompist Bulletin Board, etc. (I will continue to accept responses until I finish writing the article.)
    http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
  2. "Taneraic", by Javant Biarujia. Journal of Planned Languages, 14th edition, May 1992. Reprinted on Rick Harrison's website:
    http://www.rickharrison.com/language/tanerai.html
  3. "Abaq Tanerai". http://www.phreacs.com.au/tanerai/abaq.html
  4. Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Higley (who also writes under the name Sally Caves) discusses George Psalmanazar and his hoax conlang "Formosan", Hélène Smith and her Martian language, and Paul Burgess and his mna Vanantha.
  5. Letter from Alexander Gode to William Auld, 11 January 1963. Part of the Gode-Lapenna debate correspondence, archived at the late Don Harlow's website: http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/debate.html
  6. "Antoni Grabowski" in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Grabowski
    The Esperanto version of this article is based on an article by Kálmán Kaloscay in the 1933 Enciklopedio de Esperanto, which contains the anecdotes about Grabowski's attempts to converse in Volapük with Johann Martin Schleyer (sometime between 1880 and 1887) and his more successful conversation with Zamenhof in Esperanto in late 1887. I have not yet traced these anecdotes further back, but I think it possible and plan to do so.
  7. "Applying the Comprehension Hypothesis: Some Suggestions" by Stephen D. Krashen. International Journal of Language Teaching, 1: 21-29 (2004). http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/eta_paper/index.html
  8. "The Language of K..." Transcript of interview with Robert Dessaix, from Lingua Franca, 19 December 1998. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/stories/1998/693291.htm
  9. "Introducing Paul Burgess and his radioactive imagination!" CONLANG mailing list posting from Paul Burgess of 18 March 2003, in reply to And Rosta (in a thread started by Sally Caves). http://archives.conlang.info/ji/phoelque/dhafeiqhian.html
  10. "mna Sipri Cilama" by Paul Burgess. http://www.paulburgess.org/msc.html
  11. "Lunatic Survey" CONLANG mailing list posting from Joshua James Shinavier of 26 September 1998, in reply to Sally Caves. http://archives.conlang.info/fhu/bardae/pualtuzhaen.html
  12. "History of gjâ-zym-byn" by Jim Henry. http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/history.htm

The Zompist Bulletin Board does not generally archive discussion threads indefinitely; the thread "Can you speak your conlang?" of March-July 2008 I mention has aged off and been deleted. I can email my offline copy of this thread to anyone who is interested.