What's this all about?

Qohenje, obviously, is not a real language, although I like to think it could be...

It is what is often called a "conlang" (constructed language). I began constructing it in about 1990, inspired initially by a science fiction series (whose author showed no subsequent interest in the language, and who will therefore remain nameless!) The exercise was partially just for fun, and partially an excellent way to deepen my understandings of the internal dependencies of real grammars. Although Qohenje is far from "complete" (and probably never will be... whatever "complete" would mean in this context...), it has nevertheless been an invaluable continuous lesson for me.

Qohenje is not my first conlang. I began inventing languages in 1981 after my high school history teacher (Dean Anderson - you out there? Thanks!) required us to produce some kind of archeological "artefact" for a school project. I chose to create a clay tablet (inspired, if I recall correctly by the Phaistos Disk in fact...), and not content with just decorating it with meaningless scribbles, I invented an ideographic version of English to use as the "language". This got the ball rolling, and although this first effort was little more than a cypher, it slowly began to acquire distinct grammatical features. That first effort never went very far, but inspired me to attempt to build a whole language.

I don't recall how many others I invented (and sadly, through my many moves over the years, I have lost all the hand-written notes that I kept on those early attempts) but none of them came close to the complexity of Qohenje.

In fact, the only thing that holds me back a little in this project is the invention of vocabulary, which I find singulary boring. As much as I love playing with structure and syntax, I find the necessity of maintaining a lexicon a constant annoyance...

The structure of Qohenje has been heavily influenced by Cognitive Grammar, which is evident in the kind of terminology that I use to describe it.

It is now the language of a reasonably unpleasant civilisation in a novel that I have been writing for years and may never finish either... But if ever I do, you are now reading about the language of the Jihira-Tejlija, xenophobic, arrogant technology experts of the 2nd Empire...

I hope these pages bring you some pleasure, and by all means drop me a line with any comments!

Colin Harrison, 2006-8