Contributors

• Jonathan Bellman, a musicologist and pianist, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music History and Literature at the University of Northern Colorado, USA. His books (The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe, 1993, and The Exotic in Western Music, 1998) and journal articles focus on issues of style and performance practices in nineteenth-century music. His current research emphasis is the performance practices of Frédéric Chopin. He disavows any particular gift for languages, but he is fascinated by the idea of Lingua Franca, which is used in exotic libretti. He has made numerous valuable suggestions for improving this web site.
• Martha Brummet is currently a resident of Denver, Colorado, and holds a degree in accounting from Metropolitan State College. She has always been fascinated by language, and has contributed a wordlist that belongs to the general area of Polari. She worked lights for Lillie Cass' drag show, and listened to guys talk at bars, after Poetry Society meetings, backstage at bars & community theatres, her grandmother's male antique-dealer colleagues, carnies [=circus workers] privately and at second-hand bookstores and coffeehouses. Hence her list, which she collected in Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
• Alan D. Corré designed and edits this web site of which he is the webmaster. He is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA, and an ordained rabbi, having served for eight years one of the oldest Sephardic congregations in the western hemisphere. He holds degrees from the universities of London and Manchester, and a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation subject was the Structure of Tamil.
• Mikael Parkvall maintained with Jens Edlund the sadly now defunct Creolist Archives web site. He has published a number of studies on Creole languages, and is involved with several scholarly journals in the field. In 2000 he received his Ph.D in the area of substrate influences in Atlantic Creoles, and subsequently developed an interest in exploring what constitutes a Creole, a subtle and often contentious issue. He teaches linguistics at Stockholm University in Sweden, where students have displayed recognition of his special talents. Despite the fact that he has left his twenties behind, he still enjoys the occasional date and beer.
• Roberto Rossetti obtained a degree in Public International Law from the State University of Rome with a doctoral dissertation on the Boundaries in the Persian Gulf, and a postgraduate degree in International Relations and Economic Policy from the SIOI Institute, established under the purview of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs. After serving with the United Nations in seven different duty stations, as a scholar on the subject (cultore della materia) he was called to assist the Chair of Public International Law, Faculty of Political Science, of the State University of Rome, La Sapienza, giving academic lectures, tutoring candidates for doctoral dissertations, counselling students and examining them at the end of each term. In the fall of 1998 he was also called to assist the Chair of International Organization, Faculty of Political Science, at the LUISS Free University of Rome.
• Renata Zago is an independent scholar resident in Italy. She completed her dissertation on Lingua Franca, which was a potent force in oiling the wheels of Mediterranean commerce in former times, and she now works in the world of Finance.