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 history and linguistics, and construct languages of my own.
I'm likely to publish articles discussing any of my honestly quite ecclectic interests. I'm especially fascinated by
history, linguistics, programming, literature, and any combination thereof.
These days, I'm focused on computational linguistics—a subject I intend to pursue a Master's in. I'm compiling
a list of resources on the subject, and as I gather more experience I may try my hand at writing a few articles
on particular areas within the field. I'm also writing an essay on the history of the application of machine learning
to historical linguistics 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++ or C# for the most part, but I have experience with Python and a few other languages. I've
some experience with Unity, but these days I've been working with OpenGL, coding the systems you'd find in the
former from scratch: a better way to learn how they all really work under the hood, I've found. I
particularly enjoy coding the sorts of games 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 for languages, I've reached an intermediate level in Spanish (bienvenidos!) and working to do the same
in Japanese (ようこそ), but I've also spent a little time—read, too little—with French and (even less with)
Arabic. That's not to say those are the only languages with which I'm familiar in terms of phonology or
grammar, only those which I've spent any respectable length of time trying to learn.
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 Northern Sami, Icelandic, and Japanese; the grammar is influenced by Irish and Northern Sami; and the central
writing system is a logography in the vein of Chinese. I'll admit to being a sucker for semi-fusional languages in general;
many of my conlangs fit this bill, though I have created more isolating or agglutinative languages in the past.
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 am spending most of
my time with now. 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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