Clern...
...the language of me
what is clern?
in a nutshell, clern is a language that i invented. it is primarily a written language, but it can be spoken as well.
if i talk about my writing at all, i must also talk about clern. theres no way of getting around it. a vast majority of my writing is done in clern. my journals are all in clern. (best part = no locks for me! dont have to worry about people reading it!) clern is a huge huge part of my life. and its one of the best things ive ever done. something that i am definitely proud of.
the history of clern
...the beginnings...1997
clern was invented during my 7th grade year. i still have the very first thing i wrote in clern. it was in church, actually, on the back of some yellowy-greeny announcement and it sits in a drawer of keepsakes in my room. (ahaha, and boy does it not look much at all like clern today!) anyways, i taught it to my best friend wendy, and we used it a lot.
by 8th grade i had started to write in my diary various choice super secret words in clern. words like "he is so !@#% and ^)*$& !!!" (cute and funny). i was so sneaky. go me. (i wrote like this mostly because it took me a while to figure it out.....i didnt want it to take me 10 minutes to figure out one sentence, so i only "encoded" the most encriminating of words.) wendy and i tried teaching it to our other friend april...but after 3 weeks after which she STILL didnt have like anything memorized, and it was even hard for her WITH the cheat sheet..... i figured she just wasnt all that interested... i remember writing notes back and forth to wendy in various places, such as in the church van at homeless project about our crushes... (think i still have that note somewhere too)
we tried teaching it to julie my freshman year. she did pretty well at it, actually. (wendy went to another school now...and even though we still were great friends, it wasnt the same...)
then came cara, my sophomore year. it was in october when i taught her. i remember this because it was on our way up to spiritual retreat. that day, DAY i tell you, cara had clern memorized. in a day. i was so amazed. shes a genius if there ever was one. i had finally found someone that seemed to share my love for this awesome thing that i had created. someone who had as much of an interest in it as me.
...clern...2001
honestly, cara was where clern really started. actually, i mean that literally, seeing how it was from both of our minds that my "language" finally was graced with a name... i dont even know what i called it before cara and i decided on "clern".... i dont think it even had any sort of name at all, in fact.
after this, clern really took off. we made so many modifications, alterations, additions, and more....no one who knew anything about it before would be able to make much sense of it now, and definitely not anyone who didnt know it in the first place!
...the components of clern...
first of all, we added in a spoken component, which we called clernese. (to differentiate from the written - what we then called clerndish). that clernese stuff still boggles my mind every time. its completely phonetic. its also horribly hard. thats why it hasnt gotten very far in its life.... it wasnt meant to be completely fluent in anyways, though... more of just a way to say words... then there is clern rahtahp, which is a sign language, or signed clern. then there was clerner. that really was the brain stretcher for me.
clerner was created because my classmate and friend erik wanted to learn clern. of course, i wasnt about to teach it to him, but he wouldnt take no for an answer. so i invented clerner, which used the same symbols but they were assigned different sounds. talk about confusing!!!! in english, it would be kinda like this: a=i, b=n, c=t, etc. so, what in english would be cab, in "engler" would be tin. confused? yeah. me too. i think i might have done some serious permanent damage to my brain over clerner...
besides clerndish, clernese, clern rahtahp, and clerner, there is double (or reverse)clern. (and, if you want to be technical, there are the original, revised, and final clern characters as well -- and different "fonts" such as a scripty version, the angular version, the fancy version, etc) its all very confusing, even to me sometimes.
the latest addition to clern was developed this last summer, 2006, while cara and i were working up at summer camp. i was inspired around the end of may to come up with a way to script clern. as in, have it all be connected. really, a more fancy, caligraphic version. i got some ideas together and came up with pretty good solutions for most of the characters. the problem when i tried designing a script version before was that it just wouldnt work horizontally. this time, i tried vertical writing instead. and that worked perfectly! when i showed it to cara a month or two later, she really liked it. we made the final decisions on the characters, and cara, in her geniusness, came up with the perfect name: verticlern. so that is the latest addition to clern. we like it a lot.
and, the whole of it together is what is officially called clern.
clern is a continuous thing, its always evolving. i'm continually experimenting, modifying, and trying out new ideas. i am working on some new aspects of clern right now: the monosyllabary was first inspired about 2 years ago ??(in 2004), but i've recently been inspired to make it better and standardize it.
...clern in the world...
cara taught some clern to her sister, and later i taught some to my own "little sister" melissa. its interesting to note that, from what i have seen, both of them are more interested in the spoken clernese more than anything else.... i've known people who would berate clern one minute (for "not being a real language, just a code!" --in my defense: i call it a language because it is so much more than a "code," even if it doesnt have complete grammar rules of its own...) and then beg me to teach it to them the next minute.... needless to say, i refused to teach them any of it.
cara also recently taught jett, who is a genius because she learned it so fast. i cant wait to see it first hand! and, cara taught her cousin lisa clern and verticlern. lisa picked up on the verticlern the fastest, and has her own awesome handwriting style that is really cool. (thats one of the most awesome things to me: how everyone writes it a little differently, yet we can all read it pretty well.)
out of everyone in the whole entire world, only cara and i can truthfully say that we know clern. everyone else who thinks they might know it? they are barely even scratching the surface. its so complicated that even just to learn clerndish there are at the very least two steps/levels to get there! and you must restructure the way your mind thinks, to some extent.
clern in my life
everywhere i get asked about clern. i cant even begin to count the number of times that i have explained clern to various different people over the years. its fun!
teachers and professors have asked me and talked to be about it. its amazing, the random comments that i get from my teachers at andrews! over my past 3 years there, i have had at least 3 different professors (some not even in the same discipline!!) ask my about my language. the first one saw me writing in it, or saw my notes or something, but the other two heard it though the grapevine. its really weird to have someone say "so, tell me about your language" when you didnt even know that they knew that you had one!!
i kind of find it funny that people are so amazed at me and my clern. i mean, to me its something that i have grown up with. something that has been a part of my life for the last.....almost 9 years or so. (wow! has it really been that long??!?) its a part of my life, so i dont really think about it as unusual or extraordinary. when i really think about it, though, i guess it is pretty cool. =)
i always get asked if i am going to teach clern to my kids... while i dont know for sure if i will teach it all to my children or not, i will definitely teach it to my husband, as much as he is interested in. i think it would be so much fun!
people have begged me to teach it to them. people have thought me insane. people have threatened to send a sample in to the FBI and somehow get them to "crack" it or otherwise figure out what it says. people have asked me if it is japanese, hebrew, vietnamese, chinese, indonesian, korean, hawaiian, russian, or indian. and more. people have accused me of writing evil things, of flaunting it, or being rude by writing something they cant understand. ultimately though, its a personal thing. one that i am very proud of (when i think about it), and find great satisfaction in. its definitely a huge part of my life.
...some facts about clern...
its easier for me to write in clern than in english. and quicker too.
i can read clerndish fluently.
i cannot, however, speak clernese fluently. (waaay too hard)
sometimes i start writing in clern without even realizing it.
i can write just about every way imaginable: "mirror" clern, upside down, right to left...
i have made clern fonts over the years, but its not very practical. (too many characters is the main problem)
i'm so glad that cara and i are clerni.
verticlern is so awesome!
i like clern.