I have to thank …
So much for pathos.
- my mother, who was my first Latin teacher;
- Andreas Thiel, who was my second;
- my grandfather, Wolf-Dieter Krall and Franz Schoberleitner: they taught me to think;
- the authors of the Duden, especially the volumes on grammar, phonetics, etymology (which is still ignoring laryngeals), and meaning of words;
- J.R.R. Tolkien, from whom I got the idea for the modern Lemizh script (as is most obvious with the vowel letters);
- whoever first introduced me to the unaccusative hypothesis;
- John Quijada for his highly intriguing language Ithkuil;
- Rudolf Hanslik, Eugen Kozdon, Josef Studeny et al. for their Latin Grammar;
- Alemko Gluhak for his ‘Hrvatski etimološki rječnik’ (‘Croatian Etymological Dictionary’);
- the authors of the Stowasser Latin dictionary, especially Franz Skutsch for his etymological essay;
- Benjamin W. Fortson IV for his book ‘Indo-European Language and Culture’;
- the authors of the LIV, the ‘Lexikon der indogermanischer Verben’ (‘Lexicon of the Indo-European Verbs’), and of the NIL, the ‘Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon’ (‘Nominals in the Indo-European Lexicon’);
- Mark Rosenfelder for his Language Construction Kit (which, luckily, I discovered far too late);
- Wikipedia, and especially Wiktionary, for obvious reasons;
- Umberto Eco for his book ‘La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea’ (‘The Search for the Perfect Language’);
- C. S. Lewis for his ‘Studies in Words’;
- and Jorge Luis Borges for the famous list he ‘quotes’ from a certain Chinese encyclopedia.
I am quite certain there are many other sources to whom I am indebted, but cannot recall. This is entirely my own fault.
