The fruits of the first Bay Area conlangcon

For those who are not yet aware, fate has fortuitously chosen to throw two
members of the conlang list into the freshman class of UC Berkeley this
year. The two (namely Adam Parrish and Josh Brandt-Young)decided to
rendezvous last Thursday in the first (to our knowledge) Bay Area
Conlangcon.

After walking in (oblivious) circles through the undergrowth of the campus
for a time, they ended up at the library and went exploring.

As they perused the books on various Southeast-Asian languages of which they
had never before heard, they chatted merrily of Doraya morphology, Mark
Line's beard, and the annoying fact that good references on interesting
languages are extraordinarily hard to come by.

They soon noticed, though, that something seemed amiss: the library was
unusually cold. Walking around the perimeter, they eventually found the
cause. On the back wall, behind an immense series of shelves housing
Vietnamese novels, there seemed to be large hole in the wall, beyond which
lay...something difficult to make out.

To make a long story short, they elected to step through; and found
themselves, to their immense surprise, to be on a heretofore undiscovered
Arctic island full of hunter-gatherer-looking people speaking a very
odd-sounding language indeed.

So, eager linguists-to-be that they were, they set about doing field
research; this was made slightly difficult by the fact that the natives were
entirely unintelligible, but they eventually pulled through and compiled a
very tentative reference grammar which can be found on the web at

http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6073/Ephthdhkhqha.html

Alas, they were unable to divine the tribe's name for itself; this is
something they are planning to undertake in their next expedition. In the
mean time, they would greatly appreciate your opinions on this most
interesting language they've discovered.

----------
Josh Brandt-Young <jby@...>
http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6073/
"After the tempest, I behold, once more, the weasel."
(Mispronunciation of Ancient Greek)