I've come to believe that my approach to constructed languages is a little different from most conlangers. It seems to me that most people first fall in love with the phonology or diachronics of a natural language (or a family of natural languages), and spend as much time as possible fixating on sounds: for the unadventurous, 'build-your-own-Romance-language' is an entire genre, and will probably be the only way they'll arrive at something that can be used to write more than a few words. Beyond that, xenophilia is an overriding obsession: for phonologies that aren't nearly identical to English, [ɕ] is more common than [ɹ]. Maybe this is all just an artefact of how linguistics is taught in the average university curriculum, but it's always struck me as odd that so many conlangers immediately make a bee-line for the parts of the art that are the least creative. (And if a conlang does make it past the first post and get into some vocabulary, there's a good chance it'll have triconsonantal verb roots, which have become, for lack of a better term, a meme.) To avoid drawing out this too much, my favourite topics are more in the areas of glyphs and words. I'd rather see a dictionary with a nice alphabet chart than a complete set of sound changes and grammar. (Although grammar is, I suppose, neutral ground. It's pretty cool too.)

Anyway. With that venting done, let's talk about your conscript and why it's probably garbage. […]

University politics. Woo.

I recently got into a debate with someone over the legitimacy of the word 'gynoid.' Although the debate ended swiftly when the other party asserted that the mere action of being listed in a dictionary does not make a word a 'real' part of language, I did, in the course of things, find myself irked that I was not personally familiar with the original book that introduced the word 'gynoid' in the first place. I spend a lot of time ruminating on how human gender translates into the artificial realm, so this was surely a rather grave oversight.

Well, no longer. Allow me to relate my impressions of Divine Endurance, its philosophy, and how its values have weathered in the 33 years since its publication.  […]

Creator of Lilitika and co-creator of Thet.

I started this site in late 2013 to give the conlanging and conworlding community a specially-tailored way to showcase projects. I don't do quite as much administrating any more, and sometimes I can be scarce because I have so many other big responsibilities, but I try to maintain and improve things whenever I can.

See my profile page elsewhere for more information about me.