WARNING! This website will not display properly on mobile. If you are using a mobile device, please switch to a PC.
If you'd like to see the error page since I did customize it a little bit, CLICK HERE.
If you'd like to see my references for this project, CLICK HERE.
In my free time, I enjoy a few different avocational pursuits, chief among them being linguistics and video games. (If you want to read more about linguistics in my academic career, check under the "Major" section in ACADEMICS.) If I am awake not doing homework or praying, then, in all likelihood, I am either working on my constructed language, Azulinō, or playing a video game on my Nintendo Switch.
Video games have been my preferred pastime for about as long as I can remember. Before I decideed that I wanted to be a grammarian or linguist around my freshman year of high school, my dream was to become a video-game designer. Although I've since given up on this vocational aspiration, my love for video games remains.
My first video game was Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64, which my mother bought before I was born so that she would have something to do other than take care of me on maternity leave. My younger brothers and I played Super Smash Bros. with each other frequently. Due to my youth, I played the game before I was familiar with any of its fighters (in fact, I played it before I could even read properly), who include some of Nintendo's biggest stars like Mario, Pikachu, and Link from The Legend of Zelda. This is unusual because one of Smash's largest appeals is that it is a crossover fighting game; however, for me, Super Smash Bros. is actually what drew me into other video-game series. As the series has grown and begun to include more obscure characters, this is not an uncommon occurence any longer, but, for the first game in the series, my situation was atypical. Seeing the series explode in popularity and grow into a roster of nearly ninety characters with its latest entry, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, has been a delight and, in many ways, a fulfillment of my childhood dreams.
Later, my father introduced me to Star Fox 64, an on-rails shooter oriented around earning high scores. This game sparked a love for arcade-y game design and campy dialogue that remains in me to this day, and I still consider myself a big fan of the Star Fox series despite its relative obscurity. As far as I'm concerned, Star Fox 64 3D is about as good as on-rails shooters get.
As I grew up, my father took me to arcades, and it was there that I developed my affinity for Dig Dug (pictured), Namco's unique twist on the maze games and Pac-Man clones of the 1980s. In it, the player controls a miner equipped with a shovel–air pump hybrid tool that must destroy hordes of underground monsters in order to progress. To this day, Dig Dug remains my favorite classic arcade game, and it served to reinforce my affection for score-focused video games.
Today, my favorite video game is The Wonderful 101, a 2013 stylish-action title from PlatinumGames. Based on a fusion of Power Rangers and Western comic books, the game follows a relatively light story brimming with the aforementioned campy dialogue I adore, but its strong suit is its high-speed, technically impressive combat system reminiscent both of classic beam'-em-ups like Viewtiful Joe and of stylish-action forerunners like Devil May Cry. For me, The Wonderful 101 is unrivaled in the sphere of video games because of the depth of its gameplay and because of the relative enjoyment I find in its plot.
When I simply feel like unwinding and playing video games casually, I also greatly enjoy platformers such as most Super Mario titles. I especially like Kirby games, which provide an excellent combination of easygoing yet varied gameplay and interesting level design. Kirby is also excellent for its multiplayer content, but, if I want to play with friends or family, I am much more prone to sit down with an entry in the Mario Kart series.
This is my list of my top ten favorite video games of all time. All opinions are my own.
I also greatly enjoy linguistics as a pastime in addition to my pursuit of it academically. Though I now study it and hope to become a doctor and professor of linguistics for my career, this has not hindered my genuine enjoyment of the discipline as a hobby. Far and away my the best example of this is my labor of love, Azulinō, which is a constructed language I have been working on since my sophomore year of high school.
Azulinō [ə.zʊ.lɪˈnoː] (this is a transcription of my language's name in the International Phonetic Alphabet; if you can't read it, Wikipedia's help page is a good starting place)—in more conventional English transcription, that's approximately "uh-zoo-lih-noh"—is my constructed language. It is a posteriori (Latin for "from the latter"), which means that it is derived mainly from at least one existing language, because it is descended from Proto-Indo-European, the real-world common ancestor to most European languages, including English, German, Greek, Albanian, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese among others. Gramatically, I based Azulinō on Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and, to a lesser extent, Finnish; phonetically, the language is mainly inspired by the Tuscan dialect of Italian, which is most evident in its intervocalic lenition of plosives to fricatives, as well as by Modern Greek and Finnish again.
Azulinō's phonological inventory is fairly typical by the standards of most European languages. It has six vowels /i y e ä o u/ and seventeen consonants, which is fairly conservative for a phonological inventory; however, its consonants are subject to considerable phonetic variation, depending upon their position within a word, and its vowels undergo considerable changes in quality and length, as well, depending primarily upon the stress pattern of a word and the surrounding consonants or absence thereof. Azulinō's rhotic is /ɹ/, which is closer to the English ⟨r⟩-sound than to the typical Indo-European trill /r/ or tap /ɾ/; however, it lacks many of the numerous co-articulations present in the English ⟨r⟩, so it most closely resembles the typical Albanian pronunciation of ⟨r⟩ instead.
Furthermore, Azulinō's phonotactic constraints largely adhere to the sonority-sequencing principle with the main and cross-linguistically common exception of the sibilants /s z/. It is a mora-timed language.
Azulinō's nouns belong to one of three different gender categories: feminine, masculine, and neuter. Adjectives must agree with their nouns in gender. Nouns come in eight different cases, which are inflection patterns that denote the syntactic role of a word:
They also inflect for three numbers:
Its verbs are also morphologically rich, inflecting for the same three numbers as well as three persons in order to agree with their subjects in addition to three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative—although the imperative is defective) and three tenses (past, present, and future). Verbs can also optionally take up to two aspectual particles, which work with the verb to describe how an action transpires relative to its tense. In total, a single verb in Azulinō can have over 200 distinct forms, but, because the language is closer to agglutinative than fusional. For reference, English is an analytic language, which means its chief means of showing the relationships between words is through additonal words, not affixes.
Azulinō enjoys relatively free word order because of its robust system of obligatory agreement and its synthetic morphology, but its default word order is subject–object–verb (SOV). For comparison, English's default and typical word order is subject–verb–object (SVO). So, whereas an English speaker would say, "Victor likes Courtney", a speaker of Azulinō would say the equivalent of, "Victor Courtney likes," which sounds unusual or perhaps archaic to our ears.
Azulinō is spoken by the Selorinȳ [sɛ.lɔ.ɹɪˈnyː] (approximately: "seh-lor-ih-nyoo")—in English, they would be called the "Selorines". They are a littoral people from the city of Selōra [sɛˈloː.ɹə] (approximately: "seh-lor-uh"), which is situated on the inner coast of a doughnut-shaped piece of land that, in the semi-fictional world in which this language is spoken, encircles the sea. The Selorines hold the sea in high regard; in fact, the name of their city comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *séh₂ls, which is cognate with the English word "salt" and means just that, referencing the salinity of the ocean. Furthermore, Selorine religion's creation myth holds that Reöma [ɹeˈoː.mə] (approximately: "ray-oh-muh"), the goddess of the sea, formed humanity out of sea foam (I took inspiration for this from the real-world Roman myth on the origin of Venus, who was also believed to have been created out of sea foam).
Their language distinguishes thirteen basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, pink, brown, beige, white, black, and gray. English distinguishes all of these except cyan and beige. Russian and Italian both distinguish the latter from blue, and French distinguishes beige from brown, but no known real-world language distinguishes all thirteen colors the way that Azulinō does. Perhaps the Selorines have keener eyes than the average person…or maybe they're all interior designers.