Welcome to Kvelíere, the blog, portfolio, and playground of Collin Brown. You'll find an assortment of
links to my various projects; I write, program, study computational linguistics, construct languages of my own, and
generally nerd-out about a lot of stuff such as history, mathematics, and a great many other things.
I'm likely to publish articles discussing any of my honestly quite ecclectic interests. I'm especially fascinated by
linguistics, history, programming, literature, and any combination thereof.
These days, I'm pursing a graduate degree in computational linguistics at Indiana University. In particular, my
interest is in developing technologies for marginalized languages. I'm studying Tibetan and Basque, and I have
experience with Spanish and Japanese as well. I've also toyed around with writing an essay on the history of the
application of computational and statistical methods to historical linguistics, but that likely won't be finished
for quite some time—the topic is quite vast—but hopefully I'll get that up here some day.
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I program in C++ and Python, for the most part, but I have experience with C#, Javascript, and a few other languages.
Much of my programming experience is in the realm of graphics programming and neural networks. On a less formal level,
I particularly enjoy coding games, usually similar to those I like to play: roguelikes (of the Nethack variety), sims
(in the vein of Dwarf Fortress), and grand strategy games (such as Crusader Kings 2). You can likely glean more of
my personality from this list than I'd like to admit.
As already mentioned, I've reached an intermediate level in Spanish (bienvenidos) and have studied Japanese for some
years (ようこそ). I am taking classes in (Lhasa) Tibetan (བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས), and my central comp-ling project right now is working
on a neural word segmenter for the written language. In addition, I'm studying Basque (kaixo) with some of my fellow
grad students in the linguistics department and those adjacent.
Constructing languages is a bit of an obsession of mine: most my work here goes to naturalistic languages,
but I've toyed around with engineered and personal languages.
My most fleshed-out language is a semi-fusional, non-rigidly head-initial language which is meant to phonaesthetically
resemble a blend of Northern Sami, (Modern) Greek, and Basque.
I recently transitioned to this site, hence its sparseness. Expect more to arrive soon. This shift was honestly mostly
motivated by my desire to have more control over the site as a whole, inspired in no small part by a number of personal
and professional blogs such as S.ai, Gwern.net, and
Lingweenie.org.
Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I'd like to say thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy.
The image above features the characters for "Mkvíele," the name of the language which I made some years ago.
This script is fairly heavily influenced by Blackletter, the Tibetan Script (Uchen), and Hanzi (Chinese)
characters (mostly in terms of its underlying structure). Various phonetic and semantic
components combine to indicate the various words which compound to form the endonym for the language.
The icon above is a highly stylized rendering of the word "Kvelíere" in one of my languages;
it translates to "Black Dog," something of a reference to Samuel Johnson's use of the term:
"the black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive...."
Letter to Mrs. Thrale, 28 June, 1783.
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