and i think there's a few reasons for that:
- i think the vast majority of people who know anything about conlangs are there for the associated media or community, and not so much for the linguistic attributes that i personally find the most interesting. people who know elvish like lotr; people who know klingon like star trek; etc.
- real languages are astoundingly interesting and diverse, with features that are often wilder, more complex, and more nuanced than anything the vast majority of conlangers would come up with. even something like klingon, which is designed to "sound alien", is in many ways phonetically like a less interesting version of an indigenous language of the pacific northwest, as filtered through the biases of an english speaker
- i've ended up not really jiving with a lot of conlang-focused online spaces, even if i like the relevant language itself. for example, i think toki pona and esperanto are both neat languages that i admire, but i feel that some of their biggest fans are unrealistically utopian about their ability to improve the world. language is an incredibly political thing and in the real world there's basically never the political will for most people to switch to a new language. that last point also makes it hard for me to care about any new orthography for english--it doesn't matter how good it is, unfortunately, when people in the US won't even fucking switch to the metric system
- i've seen so many conlangs that after a certain point it's hard to not see certain patterns that constantly repeat, especially in the first few conlangs that a given person makes. i get it--i mean, i went through the same stuff myself--but i think i'm good for the rest of my life on languages that are basically english with a simplified lexicon and syntax and a bunch of lexical substitution and that's written with a somewhat geometric featural writing system, maybe arranged into syllable blocks
i still really have a passion for languages and their study, don't get me wrong. but i think more and more over time that's shifted towards wanting to learn about natural languages rather than wanting to come up with my own. idk.
