Hello to you all!

For more than half a year I have been quite a frequent reader of the list’s
postings, but I somehow never got as far as to actually participate in the
discussion, though often my fingers and my brain were itching! Now, I
finally decided to stop behaving like a voyeur, to subscribe, to introduce
myself, and say howdy…
My name is Jan van Steenbergen, 31 years old, and working as a software
engineer in Amsterdam. Like is the case for most of you, languages caught
my interest in my early childhood. Since that time, I managed to learn nine
of them, but not all of them go as well as the others. My first conlanging
experiments took place, I think, at the age of 10 or so, by deforming Dutch
words. Luckily, I have no notes whatsoever from that period, because I
would be embarrassed to show them to anyone. A few years later, I made
sketches for a fake Romance language. A lot better than my first try, but
still nothing to be proud of.
After a long period of not thinking about constructed languages at all, I
took it up again six or seven years ago. I never took it seriously, though,
until I read something about the subject in a German magazine.  As a
result, I started browsing the Internet and found out that there were
hundreds of people as crazy as myself, who created thousands of  languages.
I like science-fiction (a lot!), but my own languages are rather “earthy”
and belong to the “What if-category”. There is six of them now: one family
of three (North-)Slavonic languages, and one family of three distinct Indo-
European languages, inspired by Tocharian. The kind of conlangs that I like
best are naturalistic, organic and complex. For that reason I don’t care
much for auxlangs, since I do not find them aesthetically pleasing.
Other hobbies of mine include: singing, writing (classical) music, and
parrots.
From now on, I hope to participate regularly on the Conlang Forum.

Jan

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