Andrew Creekwader in Questions and Answers

I have different interests: music, books, linguistics, sports...

Sports: Long time ago I trained strictly ballroom.

I like football, but I’m interested only in National Teams. Club football is not touching and not interesting to me. May be, because in Bulgaria club football is on a very low level

I like sumō very much

I can’t stand Formula 1. A bunch of fools go round like crazy with 150 mph. What’s interesting in this? Rallye is another story

Music: It would be dumb to say I like good music. It is easier to say what I don’t like: heavy metal, black music, rap & hip-hop...

Of course, I have favorite singers: The Beatles, Elvis. I like the music of the 60s and 70s...

Madonna – she’s unsurpassed! Whatever one could tell, you cannot stay 20+ years on the top, if you’re not the best.

Queen were wonderful (Heaven’s kingdom to Freddie!).

Julio Iglesias, of course! Especially when he sings in Castilian.

But Bulgaria above all!: Both before: Emil Dimitrov, Lili Ivanova, Mihail Belchev (how sad-optimistic sounds his Youth is going away!), Maya Neshkova – and now: Atlas with and without Doni, Kotseto, D-2, Antibiotika, BTR, Grafa.

However, recently I almost don’t listen to western music. I found the rhythms of the Balkans (oh, Goran Bregović), of South America, of Near and Far East.

Bulgarian Old town songs (Anna’s Kiss and Black Monasteries on Sale are my favorites!) are just sweets for the soul.

Macedonian folklore is a never ending spring, and Iliya Lukov, Volodya Stoyanov and Slavi Trifonov – wonderful

Who lives in Sofia, Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad or Bourgas might have seen a strange musicians’ group. Sin Fronteras. Peruvians. Indians and metises. The play the music of nowadays Incas – a magic mix of the vocalless music of the ancient Incas and the hot rhythms of Castilia.

Classic music has always been and remains... classics. Beethoven and Haydn will never be surpassed. Mozart is the greatest composer of all times. Opera’s masters Verdi and Puccini give everyone a thing – the flame of national liberty (Ernani, Attila, The Battle by Legnano), revolution (Tosca), fairy-tale (Turandot), laugh (Falstaff), tragedy (Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello), self-victim (Aïda), revenge (Il Trovatore), and... just love.

Of course, I’m omitting a lot. For example, Russian variaty: Alla Pugachova, TATY, Russian Immigrants’ Songs, Sergey Dyomin. Arabic music: the group Alabina and Ishtar herself, Cheb Khaled, Fadhl Shaker. Turkik music: Tarkan, the songs of Emin Sabit-oğlı sung by Zeynəb Xanlarova. China – Teresa Teng.

Books. Unfortunately, recently I don’t have much time to read. But, however:

Elin Pelin (Hey, Pizho, walk straight the way or you’ll drop in the swamp! A-a, I’m going straight but the way’s weaving).

Robert Sheckly (I see a man on a chair and the chair has bitten his leg)

Isaac Asimov (Robots have logic not reason)

Frank Herbert (Plans, which other plans are put in, and other plans are put in them; Dune is the book of all times)

Kir Bulychov (Meteorologists had promised to give us rain in the afternoon, but as usual they made a little mistake and their rain poured in the night, I love Alisa!)

Lyuben Dilov (no, not Icarus’s Way . The Weight of the Space Suite! And My Strange Friend the Astronomer )

Karl May (Old Shatterhand-Kara ben Nemzi, Hadji Halef, Winnetou)

Gerry Durrell (My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts and Relatives; Catch me a Colobus).

Myself, of course. I’m far from considering myself a writer and a translator, but I did write and translate some pieces. You may see them here (unfortunately, only a few in English)

Linguistics. The Language is the most wonderful creation of the human race. It is surprisingly simple and in the same time surprisingly complex. Blood has been spared for language. Today on Earth there is a wonderful variety of languages.
I’m a conlanger. This means I like to think out languages. I could hardly think out something that does not exist somewhere on Earth, but however. This is just a hobby. Some gather post stamps. Others gather lovers. I think out languages and make entertainment out of it. A conlang reflects my own fantasy; it combines different characteristics that are met here and there. I’m far from masters like Pablo David Flores and Mike Rosenfeld and even dare not compare to a classic like J.R.R.Tolkien, but what does this mean? I don’t chase records, nor give reports to anybody
My languages are:

Tzhingyan. The language of the Tzhingyan Empire. It covers the entire star system of the Tristellation – three stars, one black hole, 25 planets, a quadrillion of inhabitants during the best times. After the fall of the old economic Empire, the power was taken by a single Emperor, whose descendants still rule the almost depopulated Tristellation. It is a rich nominative polysynthetic language, which uses at a maximum the principles of agglutination and incorporation.

Pfiklesh. An ancient language, spoken in far times by neighbors of the Tzhingyans. It has left no remnants. As each primitive language it has a poor vocabulary. Analytic synthesis and entirely internal flexion for expressing ergative syntactic relations.

May-be-bg. This kind of language Bulgarians would have been speaking here and now if there were no Asparouh’s Bulgars to drive the language of the Slavs within their state towards analytism.

Baltas. A hypothetic baltoslavic language.

KoSCRIPT and KoPRO. This is not a human language at all but a computer one. KoPRO is a virtual calculating processor. KoSCRIPT is a high level language for writing programs for it. And as some had said: guess what you like to do and find someone to pay you for it, so did I. The system of KoPRO/KoSCRIPT turned into my graduation paper.