A perfect day for introducing myself

Some people, innately polite and well-bred, introduce themselves
immediately as they enter a new company.

Apparently, I don't belong in that category :o, but I always find
pleasure in teaching myself something new. So, with a two weeks
delay... better than never ;)

My first name is Vasiliy (I believe it should be pronounced vuh-SEE-lee
in English). My surname is Chernov (approximately, cheer-NAWF; rolled
'r', please ;) ). Like all Russians, I also have a patronymic (not
exactly a middle name, by no means a part of the surname): Yevgenyevich
(hard 'g', stress on -gen-). I don't expect to hear it often, though.

On the 'net I mostly introduce myself as Basilius, which is simply my
first name latinized (ultimately it comes from the Greek 'Basileios',
so I'm not sure where to put stress in it).

I live in Moscow (Russia, not someplace), and it's really pretty cold
here these days :). (But I suspect Artyom will say that minus 20
centigrades is pretty *warm* for February ;) )

My education had something to do with biology (entomology, to be exact),
but most of my jobs were about technical translation (English <->
Russian) and/or multilingual editing. Owing to this, I've made friends
with some profies in linguistics.

I am a linguistics addict.

When I started to surf the 'net regularly (which happened a year ago),
conlangs were one of the first things that caught my eye (not auxlangs
- you know why ;) ). I think I've seen the sites of everybody in this
list (and quite a few of others). I did like what I saw!

That was how I learned the appropriate name for what I do quite often
when nobody can see me.

All this began when, still a schoolboy, I realized that English has a
fixed word order and fails to distinguish verbal aspects. I found this
so inconvenient that I immediately reformed it (by introducing
declinable articles and profoundly reforming the tense system).

Conlanging is one of my favorite pastimes. What I like best is to model
language evolution. I prefer to take some old natlang as the starting
point. And I believe that conlanging is really helpful in understanding
languages. It gives you deeper intuition, a kind of keen vision of how
languages work and evolve. So in a way, it's something more serious
than just pastime.

I haven't exposed anything on the Web so far, but one day I will.

I am editing a few small cats (oh, scuse me, categories) in Netscape
Open Directory ( http://dmoz.org/ ).

Well, it's difficult to stop speaking of myself... But I never promise
I won't be a bore. So please, bear with me :)

Happy conlanging, and the best of the rest to everybody here -


Vasiliy Chernov
AKA Basilius
mailto:bc_@mail.ru
http://dmoz.org/profiles/basilius.html