LCC8

Last weekend, I attended the eighth Language Creation Conference, in Cambridge, UK. Although I’d interacted with a handful of other conlangers at other events before, this was the first time I’d physically attended an LCC (as well as the first time I had been in the United Kingdom).

The conference was, in its totality, awesome, and I hope to come to the next one if I can make it. Among other things, I got the chance to speak some Klingon, hang out with people I had up till that point only met through the internet (and learn what they look like!), and generally participate in fun discussions about language and other subjects. This community is full of interesting people, and that only becomes more clear when you get a whole bunch of them together in the same space for a period of time.

I gave a short talk on grammaticalizing consonant gradation in the manner of the Uralic languages (slides available at https://kechpaja.conlang.org/lcc/8/consonant_gradation_lcc8.pdf), and in the process also discovered that my use of the name “Examplish” for the sketchlang in my examples was novel enough that most people found it funny — I suspect I may need to flesh the language out a bit more just for the fun of it. This (the talk) led to a couple of mind-broadening discussions, as ideally something like that should, so I like to at least imagine that it was a success.

Although I’m not sure of the exact date when I started conlanging, based on my ballpark estimate of that date and the date of the conference, I have decided to declare LCC8 the point at which I have been conlanging for more than half of my life. Although I briefly mentioned this fact at the beginning of my talk, I figured it was worth a few words here as well, in case some folks see this who didn’t watch the LCC8 presentations (which were livestreamed and recorded, so there’s still a chance if you missed the conference but still want to see it!). I’m bad at coming up with personal ways of marking special occasions, so I figured the LCC would serve as a good stand-in for the celebration I feel like I should be having.

Finally, although there were (as always) a handful of technical and organizational things that could probably have been handled better, there were no problems that truly had an adverse effect on the experience. Anglia Ruskin University is quite well situated in Cambridge, with the train station and a number of cool things to see within easy walking distance.

I hope to see everyone at LCC9!