About this site

A little bit of background regarding my motivation for building this website the way it is:

When I was a little kid, some of my favorite places to visit wouldn't be traditional art museums, but rather technology-related museums – or, to put it a better way, the ones that would mix both art and science.

Some examples would include Electropolis, ZKM, Écomusée, and perhaps the Swiss Transport Museum. I'm not exactly sure if and how they have changed over the years, but back in the days, they would be great places to visit.

The magic that these places had would come, at least in part, from the fact that they often had interactive elements – as a visitor, you would be able to push a button or the like, and suddenly something would move, you would hear an explanation etc.

So, I believe in order to learn about something, to really understand something, you need to be able to interact with it, to play around with it. This is one of the reasons that I like to include interactive elements on this site, for example:

On the Emoji Language 😀💬 page there is a searchable, bidirectional dictionary, an emoji input tool, and the flag transcriber
The Linear1 and Linear2 pages allow you to transcribe letters into Linear1/Linear2
coscri allows you to transcribe letters into colors
The self-segregating morphology article has a calculator to simulate the calculations
The "Ringscripts, Startscripts, and Tunnelscripts" article has a generator for circular scripts
On the German phonology page you can listen to audio recordings of vowel sounds
On the Quenya poem page you can listen to accompanying music and sing along
In the Solresol section you can listen to dictionary entries as well as sample songs
The Cyrillic transcriber prints a Romanization and approximate pronunciation
The Semaphore simulator helps you visualize how optical telegraphy works
The freqy tool lets you analyze the letter frequency of different languages
The T10 and T11 pages allow you to try experimental input methods

In summary, this is the reason why I named the website "Thomas' Language Playground": It's designed so that you can play with and explore new facets of language, and communication in general. I hope you're enjoying your visit as much as I enjoyed making the site!