Updates on Work on Mark Okrand's Atlantean

[Bob]

@@ @@ Updates on Work on Mark Okrand's Atlantean

@@ Overview of Work

I'm still working on this language, getting a lot done. I made a bunch of new notes and studies and translations. I hope to just photograph them all and then make a webpage for them and plop them online and share them here and in my facebook groups.

https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

The last few posts, I got some ... requests ... that I post actual examples of the language. For such, you can see my website. But when I write posts to facebook or zompist bboard, well, I just do what I can. I consider myself a master conlanger, and would expect others of like ability to say as much if seldom on the group, so I try to make my work available for others.

@@ Notable Natural Languages I Study

It's all over my website, but I have a BA Linguistics from Michigan State University from 2009. I actually got this *degree in science* instead of a BS in petroleum engineering. And I've helped so many people all around the world as a result, even outside of what I've done over facebook on the 3 large facebook groups I run. ( Which are not time consuming: Not many people worldwide are interested in ancient languages! ) I make all sorts of important discoveries regarding language science and exotic languages and try to share my findings on my website. Though they all come at such a quick pace!

I was originally going to get a master's in law afterwards but ended up getting other career training and doing other things, sometimes more related, sometime less.

Science is very important. Now we all have proof of that. Look at how many people in the USA are stuck with a disregard and lack of access to science. And everyone will suffer as a result.

Now, some burn out on teaching quickly. Ideally, education, science, and scholarship should be top priorities to teachers and parents, not letting other things get in the way. Unicorns and rainbows.

Here's some languages I've studied:

- Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Oracle Bone Script Chinese
- Bronze Script Chinese
- Elamite
- 1600s Massachusett
- The 50 known languages written in logographic writing systems

( These are my chief specialty, for which I am a unique and pioneering scholar. I'm very dedicated to it all, too. In spite of adversity. Just think, I walked for miles as a child to get to the public library. Confucius had a scholar like that and he praised him. It's in The Analects. Confucius was so wise and kind. I've read The Analects many times. That's Classical Chinese. I'm very good at that language, just from the last 3 years or so. There's so much of interest written in Classical Chinese.

To think - to think - and to think, the Incan Empire and all preceeding empires thereabouts went on for thousands of years and all we have are a few low volume print books examining their architectural achievements. From them or the Ancient Mayans, we have few writings. I'm an expert, even, in the entire corpus of Mayan Hieroglyphic writings. It's mostly just paltry timelines. But probably we have something like a Popul Vuh from them, some big myth or old chronicle giving some account that gives us some sense of what it all was. But a lot of it might have been lost in the shuffle. Maybe not so for Ancient China. )

- All 20 or so ancient languages of the Bible. I'm an expert in Biblical translation.
( This one is also one of my greatest specialties. )

- Then then besides all these, I have studied a lot of ancient languages. So it's like a specialty but it's after the hieroglyphic writing systems (logographic ones) and the Biblical languages.

- And then I also study exotic languages. Notably Ojibwe aka Anishnaabemowin (Native American: C ? Algonquian). And Hiligaynon, of course (C W Philippines, 9 million population).

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@@ Overview of My Scholarship the Last Few Months

This has been an interesting season for scholarship. Since 3/18, everyone around where I live has been in a panic because of the global coronavirus pandemic. And I even have extra time to get my studies done but have not otherwise felt myself regarding them and I don't think I've overall accomplished much if this was somehow a normal situation.

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@@ The Epic of Son Jara as a Text for Translation into Atlantean

And somehow I've been working on Okrand's Atlantean.

Here's the facebook group I run on it:

Atlantis the Lost Empire Atlantean Language by Dr. Marc Okrand
facebook.com/groups/377768309042171/

So, I wrote out a bunch of texts to translate into it. They're mostly from the 1960s oral historical epic of the founder of the Old Mali Empire from Western Africa, in a book "The Epic of Son-Jara" by title. That's the empire which contained the famous Timbuktu! So I end up with a "mythical cities" theme, though Timbuktu has always been real, unlike Irem of a Thousand Pillars.

See, I've been meaning to study that book for a few years and actually own it. Conlanging always gives me the opportunity to do that sort of thing, study something different for linguistics and non-linguistics subjects. Lots of fun and relief.

I don't like that book, though, because unlike "The Mwindo Epic", it's not bilingual. I can't study the original language if it's not bilingual. And I have limited time online and don't want to get carple tonle syndrome, so sometimes I'll make conlangs out of what books I do have which give me and others some approximation of what the original language would have been like.

Which I did for this one, actually, I made a Niger-Congo / Bantu language to also translate the texts into. It worked out really great and I translated the first text into it. But one of the members of my Ancient Languages group, a Doug Henning perhaps, he said the original language of The Epic of Son-Jara was Mandinka. I think he said it's online. Now you know, right?

So what happened was something like a month or two ago, there was this facebook group I found or re-found called Atlantis: The Lost Empireposting. Huge group, like 30,000 members. And the writer of the movie, Atlantis The Lost Empire, a Disney action movie, sans musicals, from 2001, the writer Tab Murphy, posted some draft scripts.

So I made time to read them and ended up getting excited about this language.

And one of the group's members, Bruce Irving, has made a ton of new handcrafted words drawing from mostly Ancient Near Eastern languages. Which is unprecedented for Atlantean.

So I've been doing translations and even hand-crafting some new words from mostly Middle Chinese as accessible in Krohl's Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese. Which sadly lacks and English index but which I work away at.

Otherwise, I just make up new words based on the old ones as best I can, not remembering all the in's and out's of phonology that I read of when I read academic articles and books. But at least I get the phonemes right and try to match the language for consonant clusters, word initial medial or final, and vowel and diphthong frequency and word and root CVC or VCVC shape by word class or parts of speech.

I posted all the links to a recent post about Atlantean. The main link is above.

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@@ Further Background on Okrand's Atlantean Language and Expansions of It

I deciphered the language back in 2006, doing most of the grunt work based on major insights by scholars who had posted about the language online. So I made a concordance of the entire corpus, by hand, over Christmas Vacation, and used that to figure out the language. We have English prose translations for most of the corpus. The language is Latin but with only single noun and verb paradigms. Oblique Case is always -TEM, on all nouns. Plural is always -EN. There is no Animate or Inanimate Plural, no 5 noun classes. "I did" ( -PRES-1.SG ) is always -EKIK on a verb. And there are no irregular verbs. So it's like a simplified version of Latin. And it's also like Klingon for hyper-regularity and unlike, so far as I remember, the Avatar film conlang, Na'vi.

...

But over the years, I've struggled to work with the language because it's too much like Latin. Now, I can read Latin way better than Classical Chinese: Pretty well. I can read and have worked with a lot of Indo-European languages. Now, Atlantean words are also mostly based on Indo-European languages. So Atlantean bores me quite a bit.

The last few years, I've spent a few months each with some "famous conlangs" from movies tv and books: Pakuni, Klingon, and Atlantean.

You can see on my website how much of the Klingon I got done and put online. I think my interest fizzled out on that one. I've done a lot for the Pakuni but got interrupted by Klingon.

...

@@ My Studies in Other "Famous Conlangs"

And then over the years, I've studied and deciphered many "famous conlangs". But haven't done a new one since maybe 2012, instead using the ones I deciphered to make translations.

What can I say of deciphering "famous conlangs" from books tv and movies? It is tiresome and draining, very mechanical. It is like documenting a living language. Which I seldom do, the languages that interest me have already been documented and described. Like Hiligaynon or Chinese.

What I do is more like study and figure out things (but not decipher) ancient languages like Egyptian Hieroglyphic or Tangut. They were spoken but are not spoken. And the writing system component is a huge weird thing that's taken me decades to get the best of and find myself in many ways without peer and in a precarious situation.

I might decipher another famous conlang in the future, though.

@@ Science is Crucial: Why I Post to Facebook, Etc.

These multi-month projects with Klingon, Pakuni, and Atlantean are fun, though, because these languages are just so very abused by non-linguists and linguists alike and it's nice to have some claim to fame by sticking up for non-English languages and for language science and to do something with these languages.

I also do facebook and zompist bboard posts about it and reach a lot of people that science is crucial. Something easier to do with the body count rising from the coronavirus. And then there's the people who try to discourage me. I have some for these people but I also just block most of them out of hand through 5 years of experience with people over facebook and with the actual writings of accomplished scholars.

I study so many languages, there are actually very reasonable limits to the amount of time I can waste on people who don't appreciate what I've done. And what I do to promote science and education and children's education, worldwide.

In the Third World, most people die before 30, like in rural areas. But some of them get online and the ones that do get online, they interact with the ones that don't. So I have my facebook groups for people like that, and then also for everyone. People understand to varying degrees.

Especially difficult is when people don't carefully read what I've put online and then say all sorts of lies about it. But this happens all the time on large facebook groups and usually I just block people like that because it's obvious they're either not scholars or they're lazy schmucks who think nothing of boorishly trampling on my scholarship.

All this I suffer from First World people, while they fill their faces with food and cast darts at their televisions, counting their decades of "merriment" on both hands, all fingers intact most of the time, so that I can reach the Third World people and get some wisdom out of them to live a happier life, maybe share some of my expensive and painful education and hard side work researching and what else.

[[ I went back through later to edit this section. It's so true! I'll just leave it. ]]

...

Well, that's about as much as I care to write further now about my progress in "Okrand Atlantean Studies".

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@@ How to Imitate the Idiomatic Character of Natural Languages?

It's hard to imitate how non-Indo-European and Indo-European languages are idiomatic in a way distinct from English. So I've been reading some books with interlinear glosses that I have and trying to keep that in mind as I go. But then I also try to have fun beyond what would be realistic, just to have a good time of it.

And it's always fun to conlang because I pour just so much education into them. But I have to explain it all, which I can't entirely do, because so much of it is just so obscure. But I explain some points and just leave the rest and it's a thing I've made.

I didn't really read a lot in high school, aside from for classes. I started reading a ton on the side in college, notable ethnography. Then I started doing research on my own.

...

For Atlantean, I wish I had a book or some time to spending looking all into language universals theory, that area of linguistics typology. But I've got to keep up the pace and have already spent too much time on it and am behind schedule.

But I did spend some time reading what Wikipedia had to say about Choctaw grammar. It was very interesting with relation to Atlantean and that one quote from the movie.

...

@@ Some Review of Bibliography

Here's the major books I've been using. I've been getting to read from a lot more:

Here's that Epic of Son-Jara. This sort of thing is good for my scholarship because I study Ancient Egyptian mythology, culture, and writings so much. So it's good for African comparisons.


I included one very large text from this c 1930s collection of Creek (Muskogean) texts. There's a quote from the movie implying that there's some relation between Atlantean and Muskogean languages for grammar. I copied out the entire text in Creek and used my old grammar notes to do some "decipherment" of some nouns and verbs that repeat. But I prefer greatly the Biloxi Ofo Dictionary which has a huge collection of interlinear glossed texts from c 1920, though with no scientific abbreviations for the grammatical concepts (like ACC for Accusative).


And then this one is the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. I've taken the opportunity while working on Atlantean to make an index of the many example sentences from languages all around the world in this one book. They're all scientifically glossed with the standard abbreviations listed in the front and even many grammatical concepts listed and explained there as well.

Once the index is complete, which I've been doing by hand the last few weeks, I might use it to give Atlantean words from all over the world. But probably not. See, I'm not that into it and the last month or two working on it has been the exception to the rule. Otherwise, I work on this language once a year for 5 hours, maybe twice a year for 10 hours. It's the concepts involved that I don't like so much: the grammar, all the ideas associated with it. Pakuni is nice because I'm very into "Prehistory Studies" with my "Hieroglyphic Studies", hieroglyphic writing system linguistics.

Over the years, I've used this book and an Introduction to Linguistic Typology book by Whaley a lot in making conlangs. But what I need for Atlantean from that book is what is most common with languages. Which it rarely addresses. So I just go from memory and try to have fun and see what's interested online. But I do it all to make subtle statements about science and about public outreach. And also, implicitly, regarding research budgets and "you get what you put in". And reading between the lines, that's always important.


I used this one to "hand craft" a lot of new words for Atlantean. A year or two ago, I computer-generated 200,000 words - well, the makings of words - for Atlantean. I used it for a project back about 2018, probably when I made it, the James Bateman stories, and then use it when I'm on the computer but then otherwise just hand-craft words I want and then make up the rest. And recently I've begun making lists of the common words and grammatical concepts. Hopefully you'll see.

I've used some other dictionaries but this one is notable.


For Atlantean, I did a study out of here on Early Georgian (before Old or Classical Georgian). I've notably been studying how common it is for languages to have verbs that inflect for Object, just using what books I have and a little bit of online time. I remember Professor Grover Hudson taught me Classical Ethiopic one on one at Michigan State University. He's retired and working on his books now. Its verbs inflected for Object. I think Biblical Hebrew also does some times.

I also used the Epi-Olmec grammar and complete lexicon in this one to add yet more words from Epi-Olmec. Back in 2018, I added quite a few. Sound correspondences: I could take pains to make them consistent between 2018 and 2020 but ... I think that would be too much on top of all this.


@@ Some Discussion of the Choctaw Quote

And then here's that famous quote:

"... And what's really amazing is that if you deconstructed Latin, overlaid it with a little Sumerian, throw in a dash of Thessalonian: You'd be getting close to their basic grammatical structure. Or at least you'd be in the same ballpark. Which is almost exactly like certain obscure offshoots of Choctaw! Well, obviously using Creek pronunciation, but you get the point, proving once and for all, that Atlantean trade routes accessed the New World centuries before the Bronze Age! Take that, Mr. Harcourt!" - Milo Thatch, talking to Helga and Rourke.

( Page 55 of The Illustrated Script. )

...

I recently did a whole article about this for the Empireposting group and my Atlantean Language facebook group.

The Atlantean that Okrand made, though, is somewhat like this but somewhat not like this, it seems. Atlantean grammar is mostly like Latin but with postpositions and more noun classes. So it is like Sumerian (or Finnish) also, but less so. It's also more agglutinative. On all counts, it doesn't seem much like Choctaw to me, for grammar.

I think the overall construction of the words is like Austronesian languages: CVCVC being typical for noun and verb roots. It doesn't have a lot of consonant clusters or even phonemes.

And then its subordinate clauses precede the word or clause they modify, which is apparently like Japanese. Nouns have adjectives and genitive nouns after them. And then it's an SOV language.

The grammar is summarized here:
https://naviklingon.blogspot.com/2018/1 ... w=flipcard

It is notably tiresome to have to write something like OKWEP-EN-TEM for ( eye-PL-OBLIQUE ). It reminds me of Turkish, though, which is more agglutinative for morphology.

The verb chain is
Negation Directional Directional-VERB.ROOT-Passive-Mood-Tense-Person.Number . Something like that.

And this is all without additions by me.

Which to me is a lot like Latin. Also, if he did something more analytic in contrast to Klingon, I think that would have been better. Because Klingon also does all this huge verb chain stuff.

In some ways, Okrand is not good about making realistic conlangs. And not just as far as morphology goes and regular and irregular verbs and 5 or so paradigms. I especially mean about how long the words are, how long the verb and noun stems are, this sort of thing.

Then I also don't like the conlanging model for movies tv and books where the creators don't present the complete dictionary and grammar right away but leave it for fans to document and decipher. If ever.

...

Some of the quote seems to be poetics. Thessalonian (a type of Ancient Greek) and Latin are very similar grammatically. The film's Atlantean princess heroine was voiced by Cree Summers, who is Cree (Algonquian). Is that where the Creek comes from? Atlantean does not seem much like any Muskegeon language to me, in any major way. I haven't looked into it very much yet and have even been studying all sorts of Native American or Indigenous New World languages the past 3 years.

I and the other scholars and "developers" of Okrand's Atlantean language might use this quote to develop and make alternative versions of the Atlantean language.

The overarching concept of Atlantean, however, is that the language never changes and that all languages came from it. To achieve that effect, Okrand used Proto-Indo-European to make its words, mostly, with some words pulled from all over.

The backstory from the movie and books implies that all peoples and languages came from Atlantis (after The Great Flood, which they caused accidentally), but that they especially interacted with the first civilizations.

So my own research grew up with the Atlantean Language but eventually grew out of it because it writes with an alphabet and is just too much like Indo-European languages, of which I forever tire. (I can read all Germanic and Romance languages quite well. And then some Chinese and Japanese. But I mostly focus on language science research projects, not being able to read a ton of very different languages.)

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@@ "Portrait of the Artists as People who Don't Value Science or Breathing Very Much, Alas"

Then, just for fun, here's an artist's approximation of what my life would look like if I had become a petroleum engineer instead of getting a BA Linguistics and learning "the secrets of the universe" through the study of many ancient languages.

So I guess the artist thinks that I'd have a beard and not have to wear glasses. How could that be? Maybe I'd be wearing contact lenses. I had those for a while in high school once.

What is all that green stuff raining from the air?



Is that the oobleck? I read that stuff is dangerous in a science book. Too bad some people won't listen to me because I am a scientist and they know better. Already this year I've even had some friends and relatives "succumb to the suffocating oobleck". But science and scholarship and internet fact-checking aren't so useless after all, now are they? Well, I did my part in the decades preceeding this present nightmare. I even foresaw the high likelihood of a devastating global pandemic within the next 100 years at least 5 years ago, maybe 7. I posted about it at least on the World History facebook group. But maybe not on my websites. Those are mostly about languages, future global pandemics are off-topic.

But I did post about it.

[bradrn]

[ This post is in progress, I'm going to submit it so I don't lose what I'm typing. ]

Quick tip: there should be a ‘save draft’ button, just below the input box, which should let you save a work in progress. If you press it, the post you’re currently working on should be saved as a draft — you can access all your drafts at https://www.verduria.org/ucp.php?i=ucp_main&mode=drafts.

[vegfarandi]

Hi Bob, I'm trying to keep up but I'm very confused by your presentation. You have started multiple threads, all about an intersection of each of one of your research interests, and you repeat the same information and same links in different combinations in each thread. Since you're new to the board, I think this is excusable, but you may want to consider separating topics. So one thread about Atlantean, one about Klingon etc. Also, it'd be appreciated if you used our built in quoting system for replies; your own idiosyncratic text-only quoting style is confusing as it's not what we're used to on here. All that is to say, I'm actually interested in the languages you're researching, but I'm finding it very hard to keep up.

[bradrn]

Hi Bob, I'm trying to keep up but I'm very confused by your presentation. You have started multiple threads, all about an intersection of each of one of your research interests, and you repeat the same information and same links in different combinations in each thread. Since you're new to the board, I think this is excusable, but you may want to consider separating topics. So one thread about Atlantean, one about Klingon etc. Also, it'd be appreciated if you used our built in quoting system for replies; your own idiosyncratic text-only quoting style is confusing as it's not what we're used to on here. All that is to say, I'm actually interested in the languages you're researching, but I'm finding it very hard to keep up.

I completely agree. This has been my own experience as well: I’m very interested in what Bob has to say, but the presentation is a bit confusing.

[Bob]

I've received various requests from the members of this new Zompist Bboard to be less clear about my own estimation of myself and my works, the past few weeks, and even off in the past, some years ago which I do not remember so distinctly.

It just now occured to me, however, that to some degree I am obliged to give my own estimation of my scholarship. And this is because although I am clearly surrounded here on the new Zompist Bboard by the world's top conlangers (language scientists who have a specialty in inventing languages, that is, combining the grammars of many languages into single new grammars), there is such a wide variety of conlangers (or perhaps possible conlangers) and such a wide variety of specializations within scholarship and the sciences: All this such that me being very clear about my own estimation of my scholarship behooves me.

And were I to encounter another saying such things, I would bear them patiently and considerately, as one who knows a great deal through long years of humility, listening, trying, and being wrong.

For in the experience of each of us we have the ability or non-ability to realize what others know. My trying to lay out my own specializations, I make it easier for everyone to do their best to congratualate me, correct me, and guide me. Should they so please.

...

I have tried the past 10 or so years to have my best grasp of the academic literature and other writings. So then if I write something, I write it because that's the best I can do and have reason for writing it thus. Perhaps even it is my style from my usual communities of online communication.

Having read so much academic literature and the writings of scholars of all ages, then, I am baffled to be met with such intolerance and lack of appreciation on this new Zompist Bboard, by so many members. But then I also think it's some British and USA culture thing or some conlanging culture thing.

...

My #1 specialization as a scholar is in the language science of logographic writing systems.

I have a BA in Linguistics from Michigan State University from 2009.

Other great specializations of mine, far after that one, are in comparative religions or comparative beliefs, the comparative anthropology of beliefs. I even study a lot about how different cultures work.

But I also have to stick by my scholarship and present it in an ethical and excellent way.

If I came on the group, for example, and said that I don't think I have much grasp of comparative logographic writing systems, I would just be lying. And scholars don't write that way, not even non-academia ones, well, not all the time.

...

I thought I'd add these thoughts to this post because it seems the most recent of ones relating to the fictional Okrand Atlantean language which I have been working on so very much recently.

From my experience reading, people who want to give me so much hassle probably don't care much about what I'm writing about. If they did, they'd hold their tongues more.

...

Me, though, on the rare occasion I come on this board, I do as I do across facebook groups and freely offer my best help and encouragement to all. Because scholarship means that much to me and I've worked very hard at it.

I do interact with other language science scholars on facebook - though not a lot, there are not many. But foreign language scholars, at least, I interact with a great many and even received well most of the time.

I am happy to share and to help but if I find I have to block certain people, it is not really such a big deal to me or to the world: For the fruit of my research is foremost things here indicated thus, and then also the articles I put on my homepage and the posts I do to facebook groups, which are of a less meaty sort. I myself seek out the scholarship of others, not only in books and academic articles, but also should it be available somehow online. Or even straight from their deeds or mouth, etc.

And I have much experience with people, especially the past 5 years, over facebook, even people from all over the world, and for the past 15 years also, though off facebook. And do have a sense for what's going on and where people speak from.

https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

[Bob]

So one thread about Atlantean, one about Klingon etc.

Oh, okay. I have some memory of people doing it like that here on Zompist Bboard. Maybe I'll have to start a new thread from scratch and just link to the others. Though I'm running out of time for this project on Atlantean.

There's really only been 3 or so threads on Atlantean so far, though. That's not so hard to keep up with. The links all speak for themselves. ( I notice that people are very picky on Zompist Bboard. )

I usually quote people at least once to "tag" them in the post. But I didn't do it once because I lacked the time.

[bradrn]

I've received various requests from the members of this new Zompist Bboard to be less clear about my own estimation of myself and my works, the past few weeks, and even off in the past, some years ago which I do not remember so distinctly.

It just now occured to me, however, that to some degree I am obliged to give my own estimation of my scholarship. And this is because although I am clearly surrounded here on the new Zompist Bboard by the world's top conlangers (language scientists who have a specialty in inventing languages, that is, combining the grammars of many languages into single new grammars), there is such a wide variety of conlangers (or perhaps possible conlangers) and such a wide variety of specializations within scholarship and the sciences: All this such that me being very clear about my own estimation of my scholarship behooves me.

And were I to encounter another saying such things, I would bear them patiently and considerately, as one who knows a great deal through long years of humility, listening, trying, and being wrong.

For in the experience of each of us we have the ability or non-ability to realize what others know. My trying to lay out my own specializations, I make it easier for everyone to do their best to congratualate me, correct me, and guide me. Should they so please.

Ah, I think I may have figured out a large part of why you are getting such a negative response, and why you keep on getting a negative response even after we tell you how to avoid that. To me, the key sentence of your reply is: ‘to some degree I am obliged to give my own estimation of my scholarship’. Now, I — and most other people here — actually don’t agree with that statement at all. In particular, we think that you certainly are not obliged to do that. As hard as it may be to believe, we honestly don’t care about how much you know about various subjects; just write about the subjects in question and let your posts speak for themselves. If you write enough about Pakuni or Atlantean or logographies, then people will naturally conclude for themselves that you know what you’re talking about, without you ever having to say that explicitly. But when you spend a large portion of your every post talking about yourself, and only devote a small portion to what you want to say, then that can get quite annoying after a while. This is what people are talking about when they say your posts have lots of ‘fluff’: there is a lot of irrelevant stuff that we have to read through (such as you talking about how much you know) before we see what you have to say. And, personally, I can tolerate that, but many people here can’t. So: remove the fluff, and I can guarantee you that your posts will quickly get a far more positive response.

[sasasha]

To me, there's a key word. "Humility". You lack it, or don't display it, which makes your claims about serious scholarship ring very hollow.

Real scholarship is subject to peer review. (This is true the world over.) Peer review means that if someone boasts in their academic work, i.e. makes hyperbolic claims about their own authority or expertise, it is immediately called out. The work simply won't be published until the author removes the boast. Boasting, which is what you are nearly constantly doing in your posts, doesn't have a place in real scholarship.

If you want to be taken seriously, therefore, remove all (I mean ALL) the boasting. The endless paragraphs about your estimation of your own scholarship achieve only one thing: convincing others that you are not in fact an estimable scholar. Scholarship is built on humility.

[Vardelm]

Edited for reasons.

[bradrn]

Edited for reasons.

I think that this is a bit harsh. At this point, I’m almost certain Bob is not lying about his degree (even if it isn’t as ‘estimable’ as he is making it out to be). Certainly, I would definitely not classify him as a quack, as he genuinely seems to know what he is talking about (even if his presentation is awful). And I’m fairly sure that his writing style is just a personal quirk (an annoying one, to be sure, but a personal quirk nonetheless) — one which, based on his more recent posts, he seems to be slowly changing — and not a marker of ‘delusion and/or narcissism’ as you say.

[Vardelm]

Edited for reasons.

[Curlyjimsam]

Most of us manage not to talk about our conlanging "qualifications" very much if at all. As has been said, let your work speak for itself. Formal academic qualifications don't necessarily mean very much when it comes to conlanging anyway.

[kadmii]

what is this thread