Teresh's Home Page

Home | Site Map

Who is Teresh?

Well, since you asked:

In Brief

Personal:
- AKA Terry Donnelly
- Age: 52
- Married 22 years
- 3 children
Professional:
- Former professional translator
- Served for a time as an ESL tutor
- Worked as a library automation programmer and system administrator
- Currently a library Director
Avocations (besides languages):
- Gardening
- Music (choir singing and guitar)
- tai chi
- Computers and programming (for fun)

Languages

My main hobby is languages, natural and constructed. So far as natural languages are concerned, I studied Russian in college and translated it and taught Russian ESL students for several years. I taught myself Greek and Arabic, but haven't kept up with either too much. I took Latin and Spanish in school, but don't remember much of either. I have more than a casual knowledge of Japanese and Swahili and a nodding acquaintance with probably 20 more languages (i.e., I've read a grammar cover to cover at least once). I recently developed an interest in Ancient Egyptian. You can see my Webpage on that topic here.

As for constructed languages, I've completed the correspondance course of the Esperanto League of North America and read the recently-published grammar of Lojban put out by the Logical Language Group. I've been an active student of Klingon for about 12 years and a member of the Klingon Language Institute for about 10. Someone on the Klingon language mailing list once posted a 10-question quiz to see if you were obsessed with Klingon. I scored 9 out of 10 (I'm not proud of this fact!). You can find my Klingon pages here.

I wrote my first constructed language when I was in high school. It was called Frennix and was basically a relex of Spanish transcribed in modified tengwar. I managed to translate about 3 pages of The Hobbit before I ran out of steam. All I can remember of it is the word for 'dragon': banakol.

I wrote several language sketches over my high school and college years, usually as part of the background to some story I was contemplating, but I remember very little about them. I do recall one, called Spretun, which I made to support a hoax I was going to try to pull involving a made-up religion (Spretun was supposed to be the divinely revealed language of its scriptures). Elements of Spretun ended up in my first mature conlang, Vogu.

As I noted elsewhere, Vogu (or Vogukadane) had its origin in a made-up religion, too, but it rapidly expanded into the language of a culture on the alternate world, Zyem. To give the world and the language a semblance of reality, I fleshed it out with other cultures and their languages.

All of this material just remained tucked away in my desk drawer until I discovered the miracle of the Web! Suddenly I could put this stuff somewhere where others might see it. I think artificial language creators are like any other kind of author: they would like to present their material to an audience. I know the audience for this sort of thing is small, but until now, the audience was non-existent. So whether anyone enjoys or profits from this odd hobby of mine, I'll never know, but at least I can share it, so it isn't a total waste of time.

Top | Home | Site Map