Langmaker

» see langmaker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nothing kept me off Langmaker. It was in English and it fit down a 33.6k line, with no regional gate anywhere on it and no card to enter. The distance in this grave is not era and it is not region. I simply never wanted to invent a language, and that is a different kind of miss from most of what is buried on this site. Worth saying plainly instead of dressing it up as something structural.

Jeffrey Henning started with a newsletter called Model Languages, published through 1995 and 1996, and moved it onto the web as langmaker.com. What grew there was a catalog. If you had built a constructed language, you submitted it and Henning listed it with a description and a link back to wherever you kept it. Over years that turned into the closest thing the hobby had to a census, which mattered enormously in a period when the alternative was hoping somebody on a mailing list had bookmarked you.

Around the directory sat the rest of it. Translations of the Babel text, which was the community's shared benchmark, since rendering the same passage in your own grammar let anybody compare two languages without learning either. Neologisms, neographies, reviews, lexicons that Henning maintained in enough depth that they were later described as his specialty. The site also lent its name to a small Windows program for generating plausible vocabulary, which is how a lot of people first encountered it.

~ the case file ~

~ the wiki turn ~

In April 2007 Henning converted the site to a wiki so the community could maintain its own entries. This was the correct decision for a one-person project carrying a directory that grew faster than one person could edit, and it was also the decision that ended it.

The wiki was locked on 4 January 2008, nine months in. The account from inside the community is that the database got corrupted somewhere around 2008 and nobody knew how to repair it. That is a mundane sentence describing a fatal event: a hobbyist site with no operations team and no backups anyone could restore from, carrying a data layer that had swallowed a decade of submissions.

~ what happened to the domain ~

The site was recorded as offline on 4 June 2009. No source anywhere gives a date it was switched off, because nobody switched it off. What is documented is the day somebody noticed it was gone and that an unknown party now controlled the address and was using it to serve malware.

That is the ugly part and it is worth stating without softening it. A lapsed domain with thirteen years of inbound links from mailing lists and forums and academic footnotes is a valuable object to whoever picks it up next, and what it was worth to them had nothing to do with what it was worth to the people who built it. Later attempts to buy the name back failed, because the new holder was not selling.

~ what survived ~

Henning published Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs as a book in 2020, edited and designed by Mark Rosenfelder with an introduction by David J. Peterson, who by then had built the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for television. It carries essays and reviews and the conlang directory in a section updated for print. The lexicons were left out because including them would have run the book past two thousand pages.

He got the domain back in 2022. For a while the site was reachable only over Tor, and by 2023 that stopped too. What exists now is a static copy on GitHub Pages, the old page furniture and the old navigation icons intact, serving a directory that has not been added to in fifteen years. It is the correct ending for a reference work about languages with no native speakers, and it is not much of a consolation to anybody who had an entry in the wiki when the database went.

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