Re: My Conlanging History (was: Re: Tolkein?)

--- Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...> wrote:
> Conlanging. How did I ever get into it? That a very
> good question. I'm not
> really sure. I'm not a linguist, I'm not from a
> bilingual area, my parents
> don't speak any other languages (except for a few
> catch-phrases in Spanish
> that my Mom knows), and I've never learned any other
> languages or studied
> linguistics either.
<snip>

Interesting story, and we have a lot in common.  My
degrees were in math and comp sci, with a strong
interest in physics.  I am also interested in natural
language processing in comp sci, and have high hopes
of winning the Loebner prize (
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
)after I retire in a few more years.

There are a few differences in our backgrounds.  As a
kid I collected foreign language dictionaries.  I took
Latin and German in high school and continued German
in college.  I spend a couple of years in the Air
Force as a German/English interpretor and took only a
semester of Russian.

After that, in 1963, I went into software engineering
and forgot about languages for the next 40 years.
(Alas, I have forgotten almost all my German, even
though I can follow German Opera fairly well, and get
most of what's said in old WW II movies.)