Colophon
What this project is, who keeps it, and how to write — a short explanation of the archive, the art piece, and the address at which it can be reached.
wierk.com is a small, unfinished art project built around a single Luxembourgish word. Its visible face is a dictionary entry. Its deeper structure is an accumulating archive — etymologies, cognates, pronunciation notes, essays, references. The project is unfinished by design. It grows, slowly, in the direction of whatever turns out to matter about the word.
The word in question — wierk — is older than writing, older than the wheel, older than most of the furniture of the world we take for granted. It has been spoken, in some form, by every generation of Indo-European speakers for five thousand years. A great deal has come and gone in that span. The word remains. The only ambition of this site is to be worthy of that persistence, for as long as it is able.
There is a longer version of this statement, written as an essay, which goes into what it means to devote a domain to a word.
Correspondence
Letters are welcome. Because the archive is small and maintained by one correspondent, not everything will receive a reply — but the correspondence is open, and it is read.
The following kinds of messages are especially welcome:
- Corrections. If you find a factual error — an IPA symbol wrong, a date misplaced, a citation misattributed, a compound missing — please write. The archive intends to be correct. Errors are more embarrassing than silence, and we would rather fix them.
- Citations. If you know of a Luxembourgish literary use of the word, a historical attestation, a compound not yet listed, a dialectal variant — please send the reference. Specific texts, authors, and dates are particularly valuable.
- Translations. If you can help us expand the site into another language — Luxembourgish, German, French, Dutch, Icelandic, any of the languages in which wierk has a cognate worth attending to — we would like to hear from you.
- Reflections. If a page here led you somewhere we did not anticipate — a connection, an essay you wrote, an artist whose work it reminded you of — we would like to know. A sentence is fine.
- Everything else. If none of the above fits but you have something to say, write anyway. The form of the letter does not matter.
The following will not receive a reply: offers of SEO services, domain-purchase inquiries, invitations to "partner," link-exchange proposals, automated outreach, anything unpleasant. info@wierk.com is a letter-slot, not a support desk. There is no support desk.
On the maintainer
The archive is maintained by a single correspondent, with occasional help from a large language model acting as research assistant and typographer. The arrangement is disclosed here because honesty about the production of a text is part of what a colophon, in its older sense, is for. The content has been written, edited, and fact-checked by the human correspondent; the machine contribution is drafting and stylistic refinement.
When you write to info@wierk.com, your letter is read by a person, not a model.
The technical colophon
In the traditional sense, a colophon is the short inscription at the end of a printed book that names the printer, the typeface, and the date. This one:
How this page is meant to be read
This is not a contact form. It is an open door. If you have come to the site because you were looking for the word, and you want to say something about it, info@wierk.com is the place. Plain email, from you to a human, with no interface in the middle. The slow internet still works; we are trying to be part of it.