User:CKA3KA

eo:User:CKA3KA My username, CKA3KA, is Volapuk encoding for the Russian word "Сказка," pronounced "skazka." A сказка is a märchen or a fairy tale.

As an an unashamed enthusiast/nerd, I'm likely to be fascinated by just about anything that crosses my path. I'm particularly interested in languages and linguistics, ancient and medieval history, grammar, religion, homebrewing, calligraphy,and literature. I'm a J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fan from early childhood (I was born in August of 1967), and have continued to return to those authors throughout my life. I also very much enjoy traveling, geography, geology, games of most sorts (especially pen-and-paper roleplaying games&mdash;team sports usually leave me cold), climbing, hiking, camping, green building, horses, and beer. Though I live in Seattle, I was born in, and spent most of my life in, East Texas and have an abiding interest in its history and culture.

Unfortunately, I have limited time in which to pursue my work with Wikipedia&mdash;just a few minutes here and there, stolen from whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. So far, that's meant that I haven't had time to learn more complicated things&mdash;like moving articles, merging them, or performing deletions&mdash;and therefore have generally asked others to take care of these things when I've seen the need for them.

=Languages= As is obvious from my Babel userbox, I'm very much a dilettante in the area of languages, with more passion than discipline. I haven't bothered to list every language I've taken an interest in, just the ones where I've been motivated to seek at least a minimum of formal training.

The only exception to this is Esperanto. I've sought no formal training in Esperanto, but I'm quite interested in the language.

My German was never very good, and long years of disuse have made it even worse. I can still use it to find my way around cities as a tourist, but little else.

My Russian is a bit better; I can hold conversations in Russian if I have a patient interlocutor. Sometimes I can even understand jokes.

To my disappointment, after two quarters of graduate-level Old English at the University of Washington, I cannot produce unique utterances in that language. The classes, alas, were not formatted to produce this level of competency in the students. I am, however, a passable translator of texts.

My interest in Esperanto is related to my fascination with constructed languages in general. Although I like the idea of auxiliary languages, my heart really lies with artistic languages, most especially personal languages. I've never devoted the time necessary to actually learn one (mostly because I'm gregarious enough to require a community to use it with), but I do love reading about them and toying with the idea of creating my own. Two web sites to which I return time and again are Zompist.com and Ardalambion.

=Vocation= I'm a copyeditor by trade, and most of my contributions will take the form of grammar, punctuation, and word choice corrections. While I don't consider ending a sentence with a preposition to be a mistake, as such, I believe it's often a symptom of convoluted wording. When I notice it, I'll usually look to see if there's a way to make the sentence more economical. I like the serial comma, but will seek to restrain myself.

=Things I'd like to do, if I find the time= Parenthetical dates indicate when I perceived the need for the project in question. I've started dating these items so that, when I get around to performing the task, I can recognize edits that others have made since I last read the article.
 * 1) Copyedit the Earth sheltering article. (1-24-08)
 * 2) Copyedit Vladimir Propp. (1-23-06)
 * 3) Overhaul the Medieval commune article to make it more encyclopedic.
 * 4) Work on the Belgian beer category.
 * 5) Tweak the voice a bit on the Fanny Cradock article.
 * 6) Copyedit the Chamorro language article. (1-23-06)
 * 7) Copyedit the Multilingualism article. (1-23-06)
 * 8) Copyedit the Rodolphe Töpffer article. (1-31-06)
 * 9) Copyedit the Falconry article. (2-11-06)
 * 10) Create articles on Helge Kåre Fauskanger and Ardalambion.

=Links I need in order to do this job=
 * My sandbox.
 * Wikipedia's Manual of Style
 * WikiProject Beer

=Projects= I hope this section comes to deserve the plural nature of its title, in time.