Quijada appreciated the award, but he generally keeps a low profile in the conlanging world.
Quijada enrolled at California State University, Fullerton, when he was eighteen, planning to become a linguistic anthropologist.
"I left Venezuela because my brother got kidnapped, our house got burglarized, cars stolen, " Carlos Quijada said.
Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
Carlos Quijada said he fled Venezuela 10 years ago as a teen because there was no future there.
Quijada says he has hope that things will improve with Chavez's absence.
It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time.
Quijada said he hoped that things would improve with Chavez's death.
In 1997, when Quijada ran his first Web search for invented languages, he discovered that his strange passion was in fact shared by others.
Amid two dozen men and seven women dressed in kilts, top hats, and kimonos, the quietly aloof Quijada stuck out like an umlaut in English.
Quijada would endorse a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the conlanging community includes some of the last true believers in a strong version.
At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia.
The final version of Ithkuil, which Quijada published in 2011, has twenty-two grammatical categories for verbs, compared with the six tense, aspect, person, number, mood, and voice that exist in English.
Soon after the publication of the Russian article, Quijada began to receive a steady stream of letters from e-mail addresses ending in .ru, peppering him with arcane questions and requesting changes to the language to make its words easier to pronounce.
When I met him, Quijada was preparing to deliver a talk on the topic of phonoaesthetics, that hard-to-pin-down quality which gives a language its personality and makes even the most argumentative Italian sound operatic, the most romantic German sound angry, and Yankee English sound like a honking horn.
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