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Conlangers Extraordinaire #2: Carsten Becker

Posted on Thursday, July 23, 2009 in Conlangers
Carsten Becker

Carsten Becker

This is the second in a series of tributes to conlangers extraordinaire:

Carsten Becker (also known as guitarplayer on ZBB), a native of Germany, started conlanging after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and being amazed by “all the Quenya in there and the detail given to it.” He happened upon Mark Rosenfelder‘s Language Construction Kit while doing Internet searches for material on Tolkien’s languages. This was in 2002, and, in December 2003, Carsten began work on his conlang Ayeri after two previous abandoned attempts known as The Nameless Language and Daléian. Carsten states that “since then, Ayeri has been gradually growing, and my ultimate goal is to make it a comfortably usable (private) language — which I think is a common goal of many conlangers.” An in-depth Ayeri Coursebook was written in 2005 by Carsten and was made available on his website in a professional-looking PDF format. It included the three separate Ayeri writing systems as well as a full grammar and dictionary. Carsten is revising the Ayeri grammar to reflect changes made in the past few years and is planning on tackling the entire Coursebook next; however, information is readily available on the web at Tay Benung: The Ayeri Resource. The site includes a grammar, dictionary, texts, information on the scripts, and even recordings in Ayeri! Tay Benung is Ayeri for “The Web.”

In an interesting twist of fate, Carsten has translated The Language Construction Kit into German. This translation is available as Der Sprachbaukasten online.

(Photo courtesy of Carsten Becker and first appeared in the Conlang Exhibit of 2008. Quotes taken from an email to The Conlanging Librarian.)