Example of Phoeronitic writing

My interest in linguistics goes back almost as far as my interest in occultism, but initially it started with cryptography.  Like many artistically-inclined children, I played around with various cyphers for my own amusement, but when I was 10 I got it into my head that I could do better.  So I started work on my first constructed language.

The only interesting thing to say about my first con-lang was how eerily-similar it was to Ancient Sumerian, a language I was later to become more than slightly enamoured with.  But along the way, I played with a lot of concepts from Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Middle Egyptian, trying to find the right balance between syntax, semantics, and aesthetics.

The latest incarnation of my con-lang project really began in 2006, and it is this version that I will be presenting here in stages over the next few weeks.  It proved to become a major shift in direction and approach to my linguistic efforts, and as mentioned on my blog, served as a jumping point for my novel Placeholder.  Over the course of 2006 and 2007, the project greatly benefited from collaboration with fellow linguists, assyriologists, egyptologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and semioticians I studied with at the University of Toronto.  In 2008 I brought the project to several professors of linguistics, and overall it was very highly regarded—but since, I haven’t really touched it, and it remains unfinished.  I am bringing it out in its current incomplete state in hope of further collaboration, critique, and growth.

Sumerian (Ur III)

I also have a committed interest in resurrecting the Sumerian language, so keep an eye out for that too in the next few weeks.  For the sake of cross-compatibility, I will present all non-latin/cyrillic/greek/ipa character text as images, but will also include links to popular and high-quality Sumerian, Babylonian, and Neo-Assyrian fonts.  However, a unicode-compatible browser will still be required to render some latin, cyrillic, greek, and IPA characters.

If you’re interested, more complete histories of these projects will be available in their introductory sections.