When I was asked to give a presentation about constructed language (conlang), I thought to myself "How can I deliver my presentation so that it won't be boring?". Right, "boring" is the word that appeared in my mind because I did not want my presentation to be too technical and difficult to understand for my audience. They don't have a linguistics background.
I was aware that conlang is not a common topic to talk about whenever we discuss language learning. Even Linguistics students might not learn about conlang in their studies. So, the challenge for me was how I can explain conlangs in a way as easy as possible for complete beginners to understand.
In the Land of Invented Languages
Ming Chuan University library which is located near where I am living has a floor of books in the English language. It is actually quite difficult to find a library in Taiwan that has so many books in English, and I remember that I borrowed a book by Arika Okrent called "In the Land of Invented Languages".It is a special book, in fact, one of many books that cover almost everything about conlangs. The interesting part of this book is that Arika listed 500 conlangs that existed from the 12th century until 2007.
I was reading this book at that time, so I presented it to the audience, and after my presentation, we had a discussion about conlangs. It was not easy because I read the book in English and presented it in Chinese. I did a lot of checking for the right terms, especially Linguistics terms.
Some of the conlangs that I presented were Klingon, Esperanto, Volapük, Basic English, Loglan, Lojban, Solresol, and Blissymbols. I did not introduce all of the conlangs from the book to spark their curiosity about the book and about conlangs.
Have you ever learned a conlang? If yes, which one? If not, what do you think about conlangs?