User:Stelvojoj
Introductions Are in Order
Hi! I'm Marko Stanković. A lurker of all the major conlanging circles since early 2008, I am a wayward scholar with a penchant for modern mathematics, undiscovered literature, and historical linguistics. For all of about that long, I've been familiar and enamored with the art of conlanging.
On the other hand, I had my first run-in with the mere notion of conlanging at age 13; I caught a glimpse of a very short article about Esperanto in the fashionably yellowed pages of volume E of my World Book Encyclopedia. The idea that anyone could have the audacity, let alone the free time, to construct an entire language blew me away. I pictured long tables of whitecoat thinktank veterans, cogitating over grammatical forms and the best etymological paths to follow to select words like "table" and "automobile" and "be." Eleven years later, on a sabbatical from university, I recalled this vision and revisited the fantasy, this time aided and abetted by the interwebs to satisfy my curiosities. To think that it was in fact the work of but one man, let alone an opus completed in far less than a lifetime, baffled me. How does one go about creating a language in so (relatively) little time, and with any kind of consistency? Only one way to find out, right?
While I am still one of the few artlangers who finds appeal and even aesthetic beauty in Esperanto, I have indeed graduated to artlangs since discovering and learning the Lingvo Internacia. I enjoy the sort of logicality and tessellations of forms entailed by Esperanto (and even its occasional leaning toward novel inconsistencies) the same way I enjoy mathematics. But language offers far more opportunity to manipulate colors and shapes, at least if you want to talk about either in the academic sense. I create languages in an effort to harness those colors and shapes. Having said that, most of my conlanging falls in the a posteriori domain; specifically, and probably like most a posteriori conlangers here, I create Indo-European conlangs. I don't typically create them on the basis of a grand master plan of any kind, though; I've found that I overthink those kinds of designs to death. I work most creatively when I just pull words from various sources and apply the kinds of unusual phonologies and morphologies I'm prone to creating.
My most serious and developed project is Dvekönneść, a language that combines elements of many Indo-European languages with sprinklings of apiorisms and borrowings from other sources. With its most overt (but not only) influences including Latin, Spanish, Old English, and even the Slavic languages, it likely comes off messy to someone with a decent knowledge of these particular languages/language subfamilies, but it happens to suit my own aesthetics quite nicely. ;-)
