Re: Hello...

Amensazhus liel !
(Greeting in Diom.)
("May the day be beautiful.")

My name is David Stokes. I've been reading the list for a couple of
weeks now, but this is my first official post.

I've been conlanging for years, but not with much sustained effort.
About a year ago I discovered some of the sites on the web and was
inspired to drag out my old attempts and work on the again.

You can see my main project, Diom, on the web at:

http://www.bloomington.in.us/~dstokes/diom_intro.html

Diom is an inflectional language, with a free word order, sort of like
Latin or Greek. It was made for a fantasy game world. It is not meant to
be related to any RW languages, although French speakers (and I am not a
member of that group, by the way) might recognize some of the
vocabulary. One of the early source of vocabulary was heraldry terms,
many of which are from Old French.
It is not finished, but then it sounds like conlangs are never finished.

Please take a look and let me know what you think of it.

One thing I found when working on Diom is that I was too close to it. I
repeatedly found myself paralyzed when I'd come up with something, then
say "No, thats not right." and erase it. I was making it up so it would
seem like I could do anything I wanted. But it felt like there was an
already existing correct language out there and I was just trying to
find out what it was. Does this happen to the rest of you ?

So now I have decided to set Diom aside for a while and work on some
other projects. These will give me chance to try out some other ideas.
Then maybe when I go back to Diom I can progress a little more easily. I
will discuss these other projects in future posts.

A short biographical note -- I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. I
currently live in Bloomington, Indiana. I studied astronomy as an
undergrad, philosophy as a grad student, then ran out of money and now
work as unix sys admin/digital map maker. I speak Russian, German, and
have just started teaching myself Japanese (haven't gotten very far with
that yet). I had one intro linguistics class as an undergrad, and so may
be a bit naive about some points of linguistic theory.

David