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Hi, My name's Shaul, I joined at Yitzik's suggestion. I was born in England and grew up essentially monolingually (English), but with some knowledge of Hebrew from quite an early age (partly as the language of the Jewish prayerbook, though I wasn't and am not particularly religious, and partly through the affinity between Jewish communities and Israel). I liked languages and was fortunate to be able to learn French, German, Spanish and Russian at school, as well as Hebrew outside school. From age 14 I began to develop a Conlang called Tesk (had I been able to call it a Conlang then I would have felt much less embarrassed about the whole thing). Tesk began as a blending of the languages I knew, particularly German, Yiddish (which I didn't hear at all at home but became interested in), Dutch (which I love) and Hebrew. Tesk has accompanied me over the years, as a diary-writing kind of Conlang. I'm not into scifi, conculture or conhistory, but enjoy reading the offerings of those who are. For the past 18 years I have been living in Jerusalem. I work as a translator and fundraiser for social change / peace organizations. During this period I have learned Arabic reasonably well, and Arabic has had a very strong influence on Tesk. I have also developed a milder interest in Turkish. Over these years, Tesk has developed postpositions(and even post-conjunctions), a dominant SOV word order, a massive injection of Arabic-based vocabulary and a conjugation system that blends semitic and germanic elements. One more linguistically-related fact that may be of interest is that I am raising two children (ages 4 and 8) whose first language is Hebrew, but who get a lot of English from me, and are also attending a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school in Jerusalem, which provides many linguistic (and other) insights. OK, that's more than enough for now! I don't promise to be very active, and as I already told Yitzik - I don't have a strong formal linguistic background, as will be regrettably evident in any of my contributions. Bye for now, Shaul