I enjoy languages, and wish that I knew more of them. One of my few disappointments with our time here in the Philippines is the inability to learn more Tagalog. I grew up learning Spanish (favorite phrase: “El carne de burro no es transperiente”), took Spanish in high school and then took it again in college while I took French. I did pick up some Cebuano while living in Mindanao, and that has helped me pick up some Tagalog.
But I never thought about creating my own language. This interests me because whenever I think about the bits and pieces of the languages that I do know I am struck by how interesting each is. Spanish seems very clean and systematic, while Tagalog is messy and complicated. Cebuano, although a more rural language, seems simpler and closer to Spanish than to Tagalog. Tagalog seems to me to be a mess of prefixes, infixes and suffixes that may rearrange the letters of the original word. Can someone single-handedly create a believable language? I find it fascinating. Can a made-up language be useful outside of literature (presumably sci-fi/fantasy)?
Hmmm… Maybe Cebuano seems less complicated because you learned it as a child, knowing or caring nothing about the grammatical elements. You just began to understand what people were saying, and just learned how to reply or ask. The grammatical ‘bones’ of Tagalog and Cebuano are the same, they just use different prefixes, infixes and suffixes to do the same things to their respective root words. Inventing a language would be interesting, but isn’t language about communication? Who would want to learn a language that could only communicate with one other person?