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/ .
Sambahsa or Sambahsa-Mundialect is an international auxiliary language (IAL) devised by French Dr. Olivier Simon. Among IALs it is categorized as a worldlang. It is based on the Proto Indo-European language (PIE), with a highly simplified grammar. The language was first released on the Internet in July 2007; prior to that, the creator claims to have worked on it for eight years. According to one of the rare academic studies addressing recent auxiliary languages, "Sambahsa has an extensive vocabulary and a large amount of learning and reference material".
The first part of the name of the language, Sambahsa, is taken from two Malay words, sama and bahsa, which mean 'same' and 'language' respectively. Mundialect, on the other hand, is a result of combining two Romance words: mondial (worldwide) and dialect (dialect).
Sambahsa tries to preserve the original spellings of words as much as possible and this makes its orthography complex, though still kept regular. There are four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
