(CHAT) Re: I'm new! (At the age of twenty)

Jim Hopkins wrote:
>Am I the oldest one on the list?>

Unless mistaken, that title would belong to moi...66.  (Less in Kash years,
more in dog years)

I must have started in 6th or 7th grade, about age 13-- the direct
inspiration was one of those flag thingies that WW II pilots in the Far East
carried with them, in case they were downed. You may have seen them on
replica flyer's leather jackets--  "I am an American pilot trying to free
your people from the Japanese etc. etc. My government will reward you if you
help me etc. etc." That was in French, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and surely
others.  Trying to figure out all those odd words and scripts led me to our
vintage-1900 encyclopedia, which led me on to Sanskrit, "Indo-Germanic" and
every other cross reference.  At the same time my older sister was beginning
Spanish and Latin-- I spent more time with her textbooks than she did.......
First language (called, naturally, Millsaic) consisted of many pages of
verbal conjugation, a mish-mash of Latin, vague Sanskrit and whatever the
encycl. had on ancient Greek.  I actually knew it all by heart, but now
remember only "bharami, bharasi, bharati"...familiar eh?  Had a chum at
boarding school who had invented a sort of regularized Romance/Italian--
with translation of  the 1st chapter of Lewis Carroll's _Per lo miroro_.  A
more developed language at that time (Thenian) had a Thai-derived (but
misunderstood) script-- some characters were for single C or V, others for
CV or VC, and some for several syllables, like "-ainigi", the dative plural
among other things.  Many texts of a con-religious nature:  "Munane
Itha-Theno, fekerud inekadrud mundhei iminane deniei...."-- "E bhlithe.
Ikimorithaz bhlisu bhlithe..." too embarassing to translate.
Big gap to 1976, when I'd been reading a lot of SF, and LOTR-- "The Left
Hand of Darkness" in particular led to the creation of Kash and its world.
That got fiddled with off and on until I bought a computer a year and a half
ago, when it became somewhat more organized.

A few years back I went to my 45th school reunion-- first such event I''d
ever attended.  A distinguished looking gent came up and asked me "What ever
became of those weird languages you used to invent?"  He wasn't wearing a
name-tag and I had no idea who he was.  When I found out later, I concluded
(to myself) that he must have had plastic surgery since as a teenager he was
a total toad.  Ah schooldays.  "Such, such were the joys......"  (Altogether
a very interesting experience to re-encounter people in their 60s after 45
years...I didn't like most of them (and the feeling was mutual) at school,
but one was amazed now to find them quite pleasant and thoughtful folk.)