When I started out, I was so excited by where I would take this project. My initial plan was to develop several grammatical rules, and from there, use them either as a community conlang or else to create a unique world. For the first two months of my senior year, I would work on the project weekly, each time adding a new rule or piece of grammar like I was learning it for myself. After the first couple weeks, in which I developed my noun cases, which I will admit that I didn’t make up and copied from languages like Hungarian or Finnish which have a lot of interesting cases, I decided that I needed to be more original. So I developed a pronoun system that would incorporate modern conceptions of gender identity, prefixes to emphasize degrees, basic numbers, and over one hundred different verb tense combinations. It was through this that I first learned new information from this project. In my previous focus on language, I wasn’t too concerned with how individual languages actually worked, but now, realizing that grammar was a necessity, I brought my once seemingly useless knowledge of Latin grammar to the fore, and expanded it to include the most unique forms possible. After the big months of September and October, I focused less on the project, adding a few cultural phrases, such as basic phrases, numbers, and colors. A decent portion of the language was derived from Latin, the only foreign language that I have studied since leaving elementary school, and the basis of my knowledge of most of the grammatical concepts. However, I also drew from other language families, mainly non-Indo-European ones from the former USSR (one of my areas of expertise, pun intended). I had an outline of a language, and was adding more words by the day, but the question was, how would I add to it.  For more detail, check out the fun behind-the-scenes facts scattered throughout this website. 

 

            Before moving on to what I did next, I want to discuss an aspect of my work process that had an effect on the direction of the project. And that was my ongoing debate with my project advisor about where to go with my work. We both had differing visions on what I should do. Whenever we had meetings, she would constantly give me new suggestions for things to do, which made me feel overwhelmed. As for me, I would sometimes show up to meetings not completely prepared, and I often dismissed ideas because I was too lazy to put in the effort. But eventually, as the year went on, we came together. In particular, I felt like the point after school closed was when I really started to take my meetings with her seriously. 

 

         By November, I had two main, somewhat overlapping ideas. The first was to create a culture that spoke Kithnen natively. I had developed in my head the workings of a lore involving the language being presented through an academic journal article about an explorer discovering a culture based on the people of North Sentinel Island (an island in India where the population is completely isolated from the outside world). The second idea was to try and have a studio block in the second semester where I would teach Kithnen to whomever was interested. I was confident in these two ideas, but there was one idea that kept coming up  more and more -- creating a comedy skit using Kithnen. Initially, I was hesitant, as I felt like the video-making process would become a de facto second project. But the passage of time would change my tune. As December rolled around, and the deadline for studio blocks drew nearer, I realized just how time-consuming teaching a class in my already highly stressful senior year would be, and dropped the idea. Throughout break, I still held on to the idea of creating a culture, though I increasingly began to reconsider it, due to the fact that I was worried that it would come off as being racist and insensitive for a white man to write about an indigenous culture from the perspective of a colonizer.

 

           After break, I reassessed my project, and got into contact with someone outside the school, a family friend who is a professor of anthropology at UMass. I had a phone call with her, and she told me that I should drop the culture, but continue with the skit, and, once that was done, write a big essay on how I developed this project and what I learned from it. After that, I felt a lot better. I wrote a script for the skit in both English and Kithnen. Then, after an audition process that didn’t work out so well, I recruited a friend, and we filmed ourselves reading the skit in one take. The quality wasn’t super good, but hey, we got to play with lightsabers! After my advisor pointed out some problems with the first take, we filmed a few backup shots in different clothes at night. (That’s why, if you watch the skit, the first and last shots of us aren’t super consistent.) Once filming was over, I made a new plan. I would spend break editing the skit, and then work intermittently on the essay and polishing things up over the course of the next month or so. Because, hey, what’s the worst that could happen, I thought, it isn’t like there’s gonna end up being a global pandemic!