Re: CHAT: General Question

I seem to remember a similar exercise to this late 1996/early 1997, so I
was tempted to say: have a look in the archives.  But that is, maybe, not a
friendly approach.  It seems a pity. however, there isn't a Conglang site
where this info is kept.

However.......

I'm Ray Brown, a 61 year old lecturer in Computer Science at a College in
south-west London (UK), lecturing to various groups from 16 to 60 years.

I have been married for nearly 38 years now, have three children - all
grown up (my daughter now lives in the US, but my two sons are still in the
UK) - and three grandchildren.  Some Conlangers will know that my two
gransons, born to my elder son & his French wife, are bilingual (tho,
sadly, now they go to school, the French becomes more passive).  The other
grandchild is a monolingual (just 'babytalk') granddaughter.

Older Conlangers know also that I was brought up on the Classics - Latin &
ancient Greek - and that I began my teacher career teaching these two
languages in secondary schools.  However, with the demise of the two
subjects in practically all, except private, schools, I changed to
computing quite a few years back.

I was born & brought up in Sussex (S.E. England); after marrying, I lived
for five years in the English Midlands, before moving to Newport in South
Wales where I spent the next 22 years.  In 1990 I returned to the
south-east of England and now live in Surrey.

As well as Latin & Greek, I can get by in French and read most
west-European languages with varying degree of fluency.  Since about 10
years old, I've made some study of any & every language I could get access
to and would be hard put to list the lot here.

My first Conlang appeared round about the age of 10, when I got hold of old
French books my mother had used at school and an etymological dictionary of
English.  A year later, I discovered Esperanto and, with it, a reason for
inventing languages.  Over the next ten years or so I churned out auxlangs
at the rate of two or three a year!  In the earlier years they tended to be
"Esperantine", but then got colored more & more by whatever language I was
currently interested in.  During those years, one artlang, at least, was
produced - a language heavily influenced by Hungarian & Turkish spoken
somewhere on Venus; and, of course, the inevitable 'Romance conlangs' were
produced and are now, thankfully, out of my system   :)

In my late teens I learnt Speedwords by correspondance course from the
inventor, Dutton, himself.  I was intrigued by the system but noticed
weaknesses in it from early on.  This set me off with various ideas to
improve the system and several schemes were tried in my late teens & early
twenties; then the thing got put into cold storage, so to speak, when the
family arrived and has only been revived since I discovered Conlang several
years ago and has come to be called 'briefscript' on this list - tho that
will not be its name if I ever get the project finished.

I was also, I'm almost ashamed to say, on Auxlang for quite a few years
before becoming totally disillusioned by the infighting & inter-flaming
there.  It has also made me quite skeptical about the viability of any
conlang IAL.  Since quitting that list, I've had no desire to return.

I guess one other thing that long-time mmembers of this list know about me
is that I am a convert to Roman Catholicism, tho a convert of quite a long
standing now: I was received into the Church a little over 40 years ago, on
Shrove Tuesday (Feb. 14th) 1961, in fact.

Musically, I hold Beethoven in highest esteem. But I also like plainchant &
other medieval music, baroque music (and art), the high classics and most
Romantics (when the mood takes me) inter alia.

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================

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