Among the blog posts I’ve revised in my current archive clean-up is my 2006 article on conlanging. That blog post discusses artistic language invention in a general way, but makes only a passing mention of my own conlang, Gzarondan.
That’s because I didn’t have any documentation ready to share. Last time I’d worked on the language, I’d left a lot of details in flux, so the documentation I had was a bit of a mess. But although I have no plans to do any more conlanging in the future, I did always want to publish an official documentation of the language I created. Sometimes it just takes a few years of cold storage.
To that end, I published a short article about it near the end of 2012. This document has been sitting quietly in case further editing proved necessary, but I’m ready to share it now. First, though, a few words on what this documentation is and is not, because many conlangers are used to documentation written by other active conlangers, and this governs their expectations.
I spent a lot of time working on the Gzarondan language back in the day, but for most of the decisions I made (or periodically changed my mind on), I simply don’t care anymore, so I have no interest in documenting them. What I’ve written therefore documents only the aspects of the language that I feel some attachment to: The Best Of Gzarondan. Everything else has been discarded.
To make this possible, I’ve taken the perspective of an outsider, describing the language as if it were something I’d read about in an old scroll or something. That way, if I don’t wish to document some feature, I can simply describe it as “unknown”. Other conlangers are welcome to build on my creation, or to simply pinch some ideas here and there for their own art.
You can read my five-page article on the Gzarondan language here.
[Minor corrections made to PDF document on February 9]
