User:BinzNakama

1mAeMkbINSnAQAMAeMlWiAeGk1lISKhAlIiW (I am Binz Nakama, creator of the Ælis language.)

I have always had an affinity with language, but it was my educational career as a Master of Arts in Translation that definitely boosted my fascination for languages in general, but for grammar in particular. This doesn't mean that I'm a nitpicker when it comes to grammatical rules (since they don't seem to rely on logic), but rather that I like to compare languages and observe how differently they can convey the same thing. This goes not only for the languages that I have studied or that I can speak (because they're all Germanic and Romanic), but for any language with which I've come into contact. In the summer of 2007, on a trip through Finland, I became aware of the fact that Finnish has no brothers or sisters, hence it cannot be understood by any other natives through resemblance, unlike Spanish and Portuguese, for instance. This soon led me to contemplating about how cool it would be  to speak a language that not even compatriots would understand. That's when the idea of a new conlang was born, and I quickly grew ambitious.

Although I wanted this new language to be understood by no-one else but myself, it still had to have a sufficiently consistent grammar so that technically, someone else could learn it. I didn't find it challenging enough to just invent new words; I wanted something completely new, breaking away from everything that the Indo-European model has to offer. A true a priori language, in as many aspects as possible. So I started exploring the possibilities of an 'alternative' grammar, and incorporated several interesting aspects of languages across the world: verbs that don't conjugate according to person in Scandinavian languages; Japanese that has a topic marker; Turkish with its completely regular spelling; German with its high capability to cluster words; ...

The more I started taking this project seriously, the more I rejected the idea that only I should speak this language. So I decided to share it with the world.

Curious? Go take a look!