I'm not a person who likes talking about himself, so I will limit myself to the necessary. My real name is Jan van Steenbergen, I was born on June 3, 1970 (on the same day when Hjalmar Schacht died), and I live in Zaandam, near Amsterdam. Educated as a specialist on Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, I've worked as a journalist, as a translator, and (currently) as a software engineer in a bank. My main interests are: Poland and Ukraine; language, particularly constructed languages; Classical music; history. I am mostly active in the Dutch Wikipedia, under user name IJzeren Jan. Here I will probably mostly be dealing with interwiki links, and perhaps small modifications of existing articles. Also, I might dig up interesting stuff to translate into Dutch or Polish.
My user name, IJzeren Jan literally means Iron Jan. How so? Well, during my student years I used to play computer games from time to time, and "IJzeren Jan" was one of my favourite nicknames I used in highscores. Later I almost automatically used it in my e-mail address, and now as my Wikipedia user name. Only much later I learnt that IJzeren Jan was also the nickname of my famous countryman Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who also happens to be the symbol of my native town Hoorn.
I am the author of several constructed languages, two of which, Wenedyk and Interslavic, are listed in the English wiki. More about this and other things can be found on my home page, http://steen.free.fr/ .
Zaum (Russian: зáумь) are the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian-empire Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Coined by Kruchenykh in 1913, the word zaum is made up of the Russian prefix за "beyond, behind" and noun ум "the mind, nous" and has been translated as "transreason", "transration" or "beyonsense" (Paul Schmidt). According to scholar Gerald Janecek, zaum can be defined as experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning.
Kruchenykh, in “Declaration of the Word as Such (1913),” declares zaum “a language which does not have any definite meaning, a transrational language” that “allows for fuller expression” whereas, he maintains, the common language of everyday speech “binds.” He further maintained, in “Declaration of Transrational Language (1921),” that zaum “can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially, like Esperanto."
