User:Raymond Brown

Who I am

A language fanatic since about the age of 10, I am particularly interested in the structure of a language's phonology and its grammar. At school in the 1950s I learnt Latin from the age of 12, then French and Ancient Greek. Throughout my life I've eagerly sort after books on as many languages as I can, the more obscure the better.

My first conlang was produced when I was about 11, being essentially Old English with a French morphology gleaned from my mother's French text books. During my teens I produced one auxlang after another, at first Esperanto inspired but gradually more and more influenced by whatever language I was getting interested in, until I discovered Dutton Speedwords in my mid teens. The flaws in Speedwords soon became apparent to me and tried to devise an improved 'brief script'; this became dormant for many years until I discovered the Auxlang and Conlang lists in late 1996.

I have three degrees:
- B.A. Joint Honours in Latin & Greek, 1961 from the University of Southampton;
- M.Litt. in 1982 from the University of Birmingham on the completion of a thesis "Evidence for Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from Greek Alphabetic Sources";
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, 1991 from Cardiff University.

I began my working life teaching Latin and, when possible, Greek in secondary schools and finished the last 14 years lecturing in Computer Science in a college of further and higher education. I have been retired since 2004.

It will be seen from the above that I have range of interests and my website gives more. I generally describe myself as a polymath.

My Conlangs

Details of these Conlangs may be found in the Glossopoeia pages of my website. Britainese is a project in progress and its pages may be transferred to Frathwiki; at present a Britainese Lexicon page is being developed. There are no plans to have pages for Brx, Outidic, TAKE or Dee.

Britainese

Britainese grew out of discussion on the Conlang list of February 2013 on the creation of "altlangs", i.e. languages in an alternative timeline, and subsequent discussion on private emails. It is a work in (slow) progress, in the familiar field of Romance languages.

Outidic

Outidic in many ways is a spin off from TAKE (see below). It is a fictional Greek-based 16th century auxlang, which I began work on in the Spring of 2012. Unlike TAKE, however, Outidic could well have existed in our world without affecting history one little bit.
Why did I create it? Unlike TAKE, Plan D or the Briefscript Project (or even Britainese), Outidic was created purely for fun. This project can be regarded as complete in that it is all the eponymous Dr Outis produced.

The Briefscript Project

This began with my learning Speedwords in the 1950s. Over the years the language has undergone various different 'incarnations' under different names. On the Conlang list and one or two other lists it was for a time known as BrSc, before branching off into two different directions known as BrScA and BrScB. In 2005, because these abbreviations were awkward to type and, indeed, proved confusing, they were dropped: BrSc became a generic term briefscript, BrScA became Bax and BrScB became Brx. Work was discontinued on Brx, and Bax was developed as Piashi before being abandoned in 2009.
In August 2011, however, the Briefscript Project was revived; but development on Brx virtually ground to a halt in May 2012 and the language was formally abandoned in April 2013. However, in January 2019 I was persuaded by some of my Conlang colleagues to revive the briefscript project and, accordingly, Brx ['puɺaçi] (Pulashi) was briefly revived but is now dormant and will probably not be further developed as I concentrate on Britainese.

TAKE (Το ῎Ανευ Κλίσι ῾Ελληνική)

TAKE grew out of a discussion on the Conlang list of February 2006 on what ancient Greek might be like if stripped of its inflexions in a manner similar to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione.
It began as a fictional auxlang in an alternative time-line in which there had been no Roman Empire and no Romance languages and where Greek had become the dominant language; but this also made important differences in the development of the two worlds and I had no desire to create an alternate 2000+ years of history. So TAKE became simply a intellectual exercise in producing an analytic language from a fusional language such as Ancient Greek.
Although its syntax could be developed further, the language has been developed enough to give some sample translations. I shall not myself be developing it further.

Dee ("Plan D")

This project was intended as a loglang after a discussion on the Conlang list in September 2005 about Jeff Prothero's 'Plan B' and Jacques Guy's satirical Cee. However, it became apparent to me, at least, that Jacques Guy's observations were entirely justified and that any reform of 'Plan B' would make the whole thing collapse; as the old nursery rhyme goes: "A, B, C, tumble-down D."
Dee ("Plan D") was not so much abandoned; rather it simply collapsed.