How I Fritter and Waste the Hours of My Earthly Days

And I do it in an offhand way, too.

Let me explain what I did today. Dull details aside, such as finishing The Sorrows of Young Werther and reading Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (Why am I so wise?), I thought it would be a good idea to create my own language, that is, a tongue of my own making. I made the alphabet and punctuation. Also, I made a fairly elaborate set of accentuations. Now all I need is a vocabulary consisting of tens of thousands of words and advanced grammatical structures riddled with irregularities that could only come from years of linguistic evolution.

I think I am going to translate passages from books, making up the language as I go. In order to make this half worthwhile, I will probably translate books of the Bible. That is how holy I am.

My language is a tonal language, and it must not be spoken, but chanted. The two most important accents in my language derive from the earliest neumes for notating Gregorian chant, a dot and a slash, much like those used to denote accentuation in poetic analysis today. The slash, which is written just like an accent in, for example, Spanish, tells the chanter (we have no speakers) to move the tone of his speech up a bit. The dot tells the chanter to take his tone down a bit.

Rational transitions aside, my alphabet consists of eighteen letters of my own making, twenty if you count the accent marks that indicate "H" and "L." I do not count those. These eighteen letters are modified by the use of accents, allowing the chanter to produce myriad new sounds. In my language, some accents can even be used on consonants. Several of the letters resemble letters in the Roman and Greek alphabets. Many of them are supposed to look like they sound. Others are systematically arranged based on sound type. Some few are simply attractive.

Just imagine the amazing fun we can have, chanting strange sounds to one another, while all our linguistically impoverished fellowpeople are left to their mere speech!