Re: Proto-Language Reconstruction Ring

Jesse Stepen Bangs wrote:
>
>Ok, so far we have five takers for the proto-lang reconstruction group:
>Me, Elliot Lash, Roger Mills, David Peterson, and Andreas Johansson.
>
>I don't think that the lang needs to be proto-langed yet--part of the
>fun can be seeing the proto-lang that another conlanger would come up
>with given your data.  However, to allow an accurate reconstruction I
>think each person should be able to supply at least three different
>daughter languages from which the parent may be reconstructed.  The
>more languages, the better obviously.  We might be able to get by with two
>for Andreas.
I think it'll work. They're not too different.

>In the case of Kash I'm not sure--if you have three
>different related languages to work with it's fine even if you don't have
>the proto-language yet, but going backwards from one would be impossible.
There is one. Interestingly, you won't arrive at the "classical" language I
usually derive them from, because some major changes are common to both.
You'll arrive at a somewhat later form, one could say, one that was never
codified as a standardized written language.
>
>But if Roger doesn't mind, we could form a chain and put him at the end
>of it so that each person gets the data from the person in front of them,
>and passes their own data to the person behind them:
>Elliot > Me > David > Andreas > Roger
>The disadvantage is that someone (Elliot as I've drawn it here) gives
>their language but doesn't do any reconstructing themself.  The other
>option is that we just form individual pairs and trade langs separately.
>Any additional ideas.
>
>I've already been talking about this with Elliot, and here's the general
>rules
>that we've agreed upon:
>
>"We each make up a list of cognate words in each of the three
>languages, with about 100 entries, if that's not too many.
I don't have near 100 Steianzh words yet, but that's little trouble as my
usual way of arriving at Steianzh words is crunching the Tairezazh one
backwards to Classical Klaish, and then thru' the changes to Steianzh.

I assume we're only to use direct cognates?

>  We should try
>to cover the majority of various possibilities that would come up, so that
>the reconstructions are accurate.  Then maybe give some basic noun and
>verb conjugations--Yivríndil and the related languages are agglutinative,
>though, so the full conjugations would be pretty large.  Silindion is the
>same way, is it not?
My relevant langs have a fairly low number of forms, so I can easily include
a noun or two in all cases and numbers, and a verb in all tenses, plus the
imperative.

>In that case we probably wouldn't give the full
>inflections, but just the most important forms.
>
>Then each person can give back to the other the list of 100 words with the
>reconstructed proto-forms, and a morphological sketch of the parent
>language."
I guess I could be ready to June 15th, too.

                                                Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.