User:Culmaer
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| Birth: | Cape Town, South Africa |
| Profession: | Student |
| Natural languages: | N- Afrikaans N- English |
| Other natlangs: | Would learn: Lingua Latina |
| Created conlangs: | Syrunian; Culmærian |
| Other conlangs: | Carrajina; Albic; Teonaht; gjâ-zym-byn; Bâzrâmani |
| Interests: | Jorge Luis Borges; Art; Typogrophy; Pokémon |
| More information: | . |
Iuhan Culmærija (Eng: John the Culmærian, Afr: Johan die Koelmaeriër, Srn: Yuħann h-Culmeryya) : sketch-artlanger, altlanger, as well as con-script enthusiast.
I was raised a bilingual (Afrikaans and English) since birth. At the school I attended, “Xhosa as third language” was compulsory from Grade 1 to Grade 7, but I never really liked it and cannot remember anything more than “molo mhlobo wam” (hello, my friend). In Grade 5 a few friends and I used Tolkien’s Cirth runes to write notes. Although I did not discover the Tolkienian tongues, this did spark my interest in codes, which would eventually lead to conlanging.
Manga soon introduced me to Japanese. Despite getting absolutely nowhere with Japanese, I “caught the language bug.” In high school, I started studying French (and very casually working at Dutch and Latin)... and eventually started conlanging.
To me, conlanging is an artistic and very personal craft. While I like originality and hope that my languages are interesting to others, my only goal is that the language fulfils my aesthetic and linguistic preferences and expresses my paradigm and thought process.
I really like well made Indo-European (specifically Germanic and Italic) a posteriori conlangs. Especially if the grammar is fresh and interesting, I enjoy the connection I make and sense of familiarity I experience with these altlangs. I am also a fan of lostlangs. I fully enjoy creating and using my romlang, Syrunian.
I am a con-script enthusiast. The perfect writing system, for me, has a balance between beauty, legibility, practicality and ease of writing. I have not yet been able to achieve this ideal with my own creations.
By my evaluation (based solely on my personal taste), Tolkien’s Tengwar is not nearly beautiful enough to compensate for its similar letter forms (=illegible). Cursive Hebrew, although not a con-script, is quite attractive and practical.
