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About myself edit
I am a multilingual member of the Wikipedia community. I love anything connected with multilingual applications - I have even created my own (Romance) conlang (artificial language), and translated three chapters of Le Petit Prince into it! (Yes, it's on my web site: [1])
My special interests are:
- Linguistics, particularly of the comparative-historical kind (Indo-European, Uralic, Japanese)
- Con-langing and con-worlding (the creation of imaginary languages, worlds, countries) - as such I am an active participant in the zompist bboard message board ([2])
- Transportation systems, with a special love for streetcars/trams/trolley cars/LRT systems
- Beautiful carnivores, in particular tigers and cats
- Geography and history, in particular those of countries I have lived or worked in (in fact, there are six of these: Hungary, Ghana, Canada, France, Switzerland, India) or whose languages I have studied (Japan, Brazil, Spain ...)
- Mathematics, with special interest in probability and number theory
- Space sciences, in particular space colonization and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (I wouldn't mind finding evidence for terrestrial intelligence either)
- Intellectual games such as bridge, chess and (recently) sudoku
- Science fiction (Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson being among my favourite authors)
- Website creation and maintenance (my site is at: [3])
By background, I am Hungarian by birth and Canadian by adoption. I started my life in Budapest and have now moved to Vancouver, B.C., the top city in the world for quality of life according to some surveys. This is not the first time I have lived here, as I did my graduate studies at UBC. I am now retired, after working for decades for a UN organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
I am more likely to do much of my work in the English wiki, because I feel more comfortable writing in formal (scholarly or journalistic) style in English than in my native Hungarian. I am, however, an editor by trade (among other things), and a notorious "pedant" - I dislike inaccuracies, spelling and grammatical mistakes, all of which I am likely to correct in any language version of the wikipedia, my competence in the given language permitting. The possibility of correcting an Encyclopedia is one of the pleasures of the wikipedia, after all.
I am enough of a patriot to think that creating/expanding on articles of Hungarian interest in the English wikipedia will be of benefit to my native country's reputation in the world. And, as I have just discovered, I can do the same for articles of Canadian interest in the Hungarian wiki!
List of countries I have been to edit
(brief visits to airports or railway stations do not count):
Africa edit
Benin Central African Republic Ghana Sierra Leone
The Americas edit
Argentina Brazil Canada Colombia Mexico Peru United States
Asia edit
China (including Hong Kong and Macau) India Japan Philippines Singapore South Korea Thailand
Australia and the Pacific edit
Europe edit
Andorra Austria Belgium Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Germany Hungary Ireland Italy Netherlands Liechtenstein Luxembourg Monaco Norway Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom (including Jersey, not strictly speaking part of the UK) Vatican City