User:Paul.w.bennett

Who, What, Where, and When?

Originally from the UK, I have been living in North Carolina since 8/8/2000, first in Smithfield, and then on the Raleigh/Garner border.

I am differently-sane

I suffer from a cluster of incompletely-diagnosed mental symptoms, including some attention / focus problems, a set of motor and verbal tics, and some occasional ideas of reference and paranoia. I sometimes have depressive episodes, and very occasionally something that might be mild mania. I used to have incredibly severe anger-management issues, but I'm much better now, though I do still tend to get frustrated at my own failures. I consistently score exceptionally well on standardized IQ tests (including a 200, and an "off the chart", both in professionally-administered tests), and on exams in general, though I am terrible at completing homework / coursework / projects / etc. Most of my schooling was therefore carried out in "Special Education" for kids with problems in their behavior and in getting work done. I suspect it helped tremendously in making me more well-balanced emotionally, but I also suspect it held back my academic achievements significantly -- kids at that school were mainly expected to get just one or two GCSEs, or in American terms to only graduate with a passing grade in one or two subjects.

I'm a fat, hairy dwarf

I'm 5'8", with red hair down to my shoulder blades (which almost always stays in a pony tail), and a beard that varies in shape and length, usually seasonally, unless I get bored with it. As of February 2007, I'm sporting a full set, up to around 3 inches long (though I keep the moustache trimmed enough that my mouth isn't obscured). I am neither Lithuanian nor Left-Handed. I do not wear glasses, contacts, a monocle, or other sight aids.

Shh. Don't talk about the Cross & Crown. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.

My politics are of the Minarchist persuasion. I'm a middle-of-the-road Protestant. I have followed a number of other faiths and philosophies in the past.

Computing

I have been a shameless computer geek since about the age of 4. I was typing before I could write, and indeed programming before I started school.

I'm an IT contractor by trade, and I've turned my hand to a fair selection of projects over the years. Right now, I'm on a contract for a major IT company, with offices throughout the local area, doing infosec admin, analysis and systems programming. I'm directly responsible for around 50 Windows, Unix and Linux systems on x86 and PPC.

I also custom-build workstation-grade high-performance PCs for fun and profit. My personal machine is a Core2 Duo E6300 with 2GB of DDR2-533 and a 320GB SATA hard drive. My next personal project is going to be a media center.

Correctness is defined by widespread usage

Linguistically, I'm a descriptivist. I speak English and rusty German, and can read enough French and Spanish to fix most things that Babelfish breaks.

My Projectses

I'm given to starting many projects and finishing few of them. On deck right now are a PIE reference book (to be published by lulu.com), a set of additional glyphs for SIL Gentium (trying to find the right license to let anyone and everyone edit my source, but allow SIL to incorporate the new glyphs into the main font, which is SIL OFL), the Terzemian language, and parts of an MMORPG engine.

• Common - An attempt at a modern Germanic/Romance koine. About as naive and unsophisticated as an auxlang can be, in fact.
• Polyparlisho - Another auxlang. I blame The Loom Of Language right on top of learning Esperanto for the horrifically stereotypical structure of this language.
• Wenetaic
  • The first incarnation was pretty much utterly naive and a priori, and proved to be utterly untranslatable in the two relays it was entered in. I think this was because of the complex and large set of fusional "directionals", which combined aspect, deixis, case, gender and a number of other things, and sometimes had lexical meanings, though it also had two classes of reduplication thrown in. The vocab was pulled from a selection of languages based on essentially whatever struck me when I needed a new word.
  • The second incarnation had a stronger a postieriori basis for the vocabulary, and ditched the reduplication. It kept a smaller and more orthogonal set of directionals, though.
• Meynian was a "Nostratic" (actually noodled-around-with IE) a posteriori language. It had ablaut, a more manageable case system, no gender marking on nouns, a huge pronoun set, a small and simple verbal morphology, and my first real derivational system.
• Thagojian
  • The first incarnation had IIRC 288 consonants in a nice, orthogonal, 5-dimensional grid. It made extensive use of consonant mutation and Arabic-style vowel frame morphology. It proved unlearnable to the highest degree.
  • The second incarnation massively simplified the morphology and phonology, borrowed some concepts from the second version of Wenetaic, and became an IE language located in the Levant, with Coptic, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew adstrates, with vowel harmony. For all my efforts, it was essentially stillborn.
  • The third incarnation forked into two projects, Thag 3A and Thag 3B. The former is in the spirit of the second incarnation, but is on hiatus, and the latter became Terzemian.
• mQlò was a toylang based on my discovery that I could simultaneously articulate a fully-nasal airstream with tone while producing clicks while producing phonation effects while controlling rounding. I scared *myself* with that one, and shelved it rapidly.
• Orkish had four phonemes. Nuff said.
• Trollish existed only as a logographic writing system.
• Bennett was a codelang created by me and my brother. It was almost purely a logographic script for English (with ideographs for case and prepositions), with a mixture of a substitution cypher of the IPA and ideographic determinatives for proper nouns and words for which there were no logograms. Years later, I kept a journal using what I remembered of the script.
• Lizardman is/was a project that I feel I didn't give a fair shake to. It was designed for a species without a vaulted palatte, and without prehensile lips. With a small, orthogonal phoneme set, and a large set of derivations, it should have gone far. I found it one of the easiest projects to translate into, in fact, but it has floundered.
• Terzemian is an IE language, related to the Indo-Slavic metabranch, based on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. It has Turkic, Uralic, Kartvelian, Persian, and Russian influences, among others. This is my main project right now.
• Finlaesk is a Norse language, with influences from European and Native American languages. In thoery it's part of a whole series of languages for an AU. it is not fully on hiatus, but it's very much on a back burner.