User:Bbbourq

Hi! Brian here. As you may have guessed, I'm the person who created this whole thing. Why, do you ask? It's very simple: I love languages. When I was in junior high school in the mid-90s (or middle school for those who don't have junior high) I created an English cipher with a non-Latin alphabet to encrypt messages between myself and a fellow student. I had refined it and I was able to write it fluently. Thus, the seed was planted.

As a junior in high school, I found that I had a unique talent for languages. At the time I was taking my third year of Latin and it was rather boring; however, that year I discovered Persian - a language so exotic to me that I soaked it up like a sponge. I became so completely fascinated with foreign languages that within a year I was able to teach myself the Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. I found a teacher who was a member of the Peace Corps in Iran during the 70s and he gave me a text book for Farsi. I then discovered that there was a library located within walking distance of my house that had books and newspapers from all over the world. Then I discovered Schoenhof's Foreign Books which was and is the largest book store in the US that specializes in foreign language material from novels to learning. I was like a beer aficionado in Belgium. Thus started my journey in language acquisition and, to some extent, linguistics.

I attended the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center for two languages: Korean and Persian (Farsi) and currently hold an Associate of Arts degree in Persian.

Fast forward to 2003 when a friend of mine knew about my love for languages and writing systems and enlisted my help to develop a separate writing system for a fictional race on his board game called - you guessed it - Lortho [ˈlɔɹ.θoʊ]. Then I put this on the shelf for another 13 years.

In 2016 I discovered the small conlanging community and just dove in head first. I was inspired by so many people who were creating these languages and just floored at the knowledge these people possess(ed). So, I dusted off the ideas I had, re-created the orthography for Lortho (my hard drive crashed and I didn't have the patience/money to retrieve the old docs) and started from scratch. I did not want Lortho to have a General American English (GAE) accent, so I decided to pronounce the word as [ˈloɾ.tʰo] and built the language from that point on and never looked back to the current status you see today.

I truly hope you enjoy your visit to my site and hope that this inspires you to work on your language, should you choose to go that route.