m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

There was a Guardian article this weekend [link via GeekPress] about autistic savant Daniel Tammet:

He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.

I was hoping to see some of those Rosetta Stone inscriptions in the article. No such luck, but I did find out that he’s a conlanger. His language is called Mänti. The article makes it sound like a philosophical language:

The vocabulary of his language - “Mänti”, meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word “ema”, for instance, translates as “mother”, and “ela” is what a mother creates: “life”. “Päike” is “sun”, and “päive” is what the sun creates: “day”. Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.

Since Mänti hasn’t been launched yet, there are no web resources about it.