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An Introduction to the Tirazdak Language

Tim Smith has been inventing languages for most of his life, starting in early adolescence (almost six decades ago), but didn’t become really serious about it until discovering the Conlang email list in 1995. He is a retired computer programmer/analyst who has worked for several agencies of the New York State government, most recently the Office for the Aging, where he served as Information Security Officer. He is not an academically-trained linguist (although he has on occasion been mistaken for one), but has a BA in philosophy from the State University of New York at Binghamton and an MS in computer science from Union College. He is also a lifelong science-fiction fan and a musician (both singer and instrumentalist) specializing in medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque music; he sees his passions for conlanging, sf, early music, and computer science as interrelated and mutually complementary—perhaps as different manifestations of a single underlying mindset to which he has so far been unable to put a name.

Abstract

In this document Tim presents a rough and tentative description of his invented language Tirazdak (a.k.a. New Atlantean), the language of a small imaginary nation known as Tiraz Kuyemmat (“New Atlantis”), which exists on Earth, in the present time, in an alternate timeline that is otherwise almost identical to our own. The document is written as if by an Anglophone linguist of this alternate world, who has done extensive fieldwork in New Atlantis and is attempting to convey what he has learned (primarily about the language, but also touching on other aspects of the culture) to the larger world.

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