About Me

Though by profession a software quality systems architect, I have long had an interest in language and culture. I live in New England, USA, and am presently working on two conlangs, Bwángxùd and Atili.

My History as a Conlanger

I distinctly recall being the only person in my high school Spanish classes who actually wanted to be there (though I have since discovered much more efficient ways of learning languages). When the class went to Spain during my Junior year of high school, my teacher went around proudly telling natives that I was fluent in the language. I, of course, was suitably mortified.

During my Junior year at college, I was given the opportunity to spend seven weeks doing project work in the beautiful city of Venice, Italy. Naturally, I had to learn Italian before going (not because they told me to, but because I have always thought it unfair that foreign tourists in the US are always expected to speak English, but nobody expects that Americans abroad know the local language). I spent about six months practicing on Duolingo. When I got to Venice, of course, everybody spoke English except our lovely downstairs neighbor who only spoke German.

I started conlanging around the start of high school, as part of a project I was working on with a classmate, worldbuilding a country called Mageland for a DND-like game. Accordingly, my first language was called Magelandish, or Andish. I don't recall very much of it, except for a very few words, and I don't even know if I still have any material on it. I do, however, know that it was absolutely a relex of English with the grammar of Spanish, since I recall making up great big conjugation charts and going through my dictionary to come up with a word list. The ill-fated a priori version of Andish eventually gave way to a historical conlang derived from Italian, called Andish version 2. I don't quite remember what prompted the switch, but I do know that this is when I stumbled across the Zompist and the sound change applier. This version of Andish eventually went the same way as the first.

My next conlang, Redentran, arose from, of all places, a group on a forum for people writing music. We decided (for some reason) to make a group conlang. This went about as well as group conlangs typically do, which is to say, of the five of us, three left within a year and we ended getting three tenuously connected languages out instead of one. My language (as by this point it was essentially my language) was Redentran. It shares a bit of vocabulary with the other Musescorian languages, but here the connections stop. This is the first of my conlangs to have any documentation online, on NSWiki, a site for people to share information about their fictional countries in the game of NationStates.

During college, I discovered Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. Having mostly done everything that interested me in Redentran, I wanted a new language where I could use what I was learning from the podcast. Enter Bwángxùd, the language with no verbs. The language expresses all action as a description of the resulting state with optional adverbs to explain how that state was reached. I still consider this language to be incomplete, and expect that I'll pick it up again at some point, but for the most part, I've left it aside for the moment, to focus on

Recently, I began work on Ecclesiastical Atili. The spiritual successor to the long-lost Andish, Ecclesiastical Atili is an ancient language preserved for religious use and the de facto lingua franca of the multilingual conworld in which the story is to be set. Ecclesiastical Atili retains a complex system of polypersonal agreement on verbs with a relatively nonconfigurational word order.