Let Me Introduce Myself

Let me introduce myself. I never made an introductory posting like this, but
instead just jumped in. This is the only list I ever joined, so, if I have
violated etiquette by doing so, I did so in ignorance and I apologize.

I am a white American male, aged 59. I am married and have three children,
aged 11, 13, and 17. I have a life-long fascination with language, and I am
a volunteer ESL teacher. I am a college graduate with a specialty in plant
pathology, but for most of my life I have worked in construction, chiefly as
a carpenter. I am retired now.

My conlang, Vash, began first as a secret alphabet when I was 16 or 17 years
old. It soon became a word substitution code for English and, over the many
years, has evolved into a "real" language. I had a sketchy conculture to go
with it in the beginning, but that has fallen by the way. It is a
Indo-European language of the SOV persuasion. It exists in our "real" world.
There are a lot of embarrassing and obvious borrowings from natural
languages - an infinitive in -ar, for example. Many times I though about
going back and changing these to make them more recondite and linguistical,
but for interests of continuity I never did so. Vash strongly reflects the
two natural languages I know well, Russian and Spanish, as well as the other
languages I have studied. Still, Vash has, over the years, come to exist
strongly on its own terms. I am fairly fluent in Vash. For those things
about which I talk to myself regularly, I can say them right away in Vash.
Nonetheless, my lexicon is far from complete. I translate regularly to
discover and fill the gaps, and I talk to myself aloud to ensure that what I
have imagined is pronounceable.

I never met another person who had made up a language, nor very many who
really believed that I had done so. It is a pleasure, therefore, to discover
this list. I am inspired now to start another language, employing the
linguistic knowledge I have gained since I was 18.

Below are the first three verses of the Babel Text:

1. Ous vela varim samix shpaga modajat. Nam holsamix fokim bejt.
2. Kan prasejtektanat varim i os, fädat növíj tala i Shinar-la ej dá növíj
sejfasedat.
3. Növíj an-a-andr djikat, "Venu, davu dzo vej koshim favu ej nim agno
fatordu." Növíj koshta putjat llokdo kanna ijej bitjma llokdo pash.

This (obviously) is the romanized version. I also have two unique alphabets,
one "runic" (my first) and a second, which strives to look "Greek," the
result of contact with Orthodox missionaries as the Vash were Christianized
in the 8th century.

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