Acknowledgements

There are many people I have to thank for the enormous amount of help and encouragement they have given me, it is a long list, but two names stand out in particular. I thank Jayelinda Suridge (Nortala), for showing an interest and wanting to spend time discussing Atragam, and for raising many deep questions that have helped me to understand the world as I struggled to work out answers. I thank her particularly for her help with working out the details of the Arêndron culture and religion, and for devoting her amazing talent to making some truly awesome pictures of the Arêndron gods. She is also responsible for having taught me the HTML I needed to construct this site.

Secondly, I have to thank Anselm Huppenbauer (Waldkater) for giving me his kind permission to use his invented culture and language in our conlang exchange scheme. The arrival of the Vardiscêans on Atragam has given the world a whole new dimension and has opened up an enormous range of possibilities for cultural interaction that I am only just beginning to explore.

I have been a member of an online community, the ZBB, since October 2003, and in that time the board has been my primary outlet for showcasing my work and requesting criticism. The people who have helped me are too numerous to mention individually, even if I could remember all of them; but it is their helpful suggestions and appreciative comments that have kept me going.

Of course, I must thank Mark Rosenfelder (Zompist), whose creation of Almea inspired the ZBB to come into existence in the first place. I also thank him for his Verdurian grammar and Language Construction Kit, which have been invaluable sources of inspiration and guidance.

I thank Ben (Warmaster) for welcoming me to the ZBB when I first arrived, and for some very useful suggestions with regard to the geography;

Eric (civman2000) for having the patience to try to learn Arêndron, although in the course of teaching him the language I learnt a lot more about it than he did;

Brendan (pharazon), Aaron (Radius Solis) and Andrew (Kuvdamos) for talking through my sound changes with me and showing me where I was going wrong;

Katy (Allie) for some excellent ideas, including Arêndron's fourth declension;

Tim (Echobeats) for enlightening me about aspects;

Chris (chris_notts) and Deiniol (Dewrad) for helping me out with the morphology, topic and focus effects, and that sort of thing;

Chris (chris_notts) again and Stefan (Soren) for talking me through syntax, anaphora and such matters;

Geoff (bricka) for helping me out with Atragam's climatology;

Aaron (Radius Solis) again for doing the same with the plate tectonics;

and Kevin (doctrellor) for spurring me to keep working on Arêndron by competing over who had the longest grammar.

From outside the ZBB, I thank Cat and Rosie and the Scrawl team for giving Arêndron poetry its first public reading;

and Rowenna, for taking an interest.