Re: in case anyone is interested...

Rob,

This is a lot like my project, which is based a lot on Nostratic (the
theoretical ancestor of at least six language familes including
Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic). Right now however, Tech is essentially
Arabic spoken by a Georgian.

The phonology is more complicated, with multiple laterals, an ejective
series, pharyngeals, retroflexes and lenition/spirantization vs.
fortition/geminiation (as in Hebrew). Everything revolves around roots of
usually two or three consonants.

I've seen Dr. Ryan's project, which I would say is pretty ambitious, though
highly unlikely. I really dislike his simplistic classification of
single-consonant roots and his approach to phonology. I also don't believe
in linguistic monogenesis (yet). Nostratic has a lot of evidence backing it,
yet is far from proven. There really isn't much on it online, but there are
several books on the subject -- check out Allan Bomhard's _Indo-European and
the Nostratic Hypothesis_. The book is inexpensive and digestible, and
contains 600+ reconstructed roots. See also the works of the late V. M.
Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky; the latter is currently working on
his own dictionary of roots.

By the way, Nostratic, as you can probably deduce, comes from Latin
_nostra_, "our", as in "our language". Though it's in no way the
Proto-Language.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob H" <magwich78@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 11:50 PM
Subject: in case anyone is interested...


> Hi all,
>
> For a while now, I have been working on a language project called (for the
time being) OurTongue.
> The idea behind this project is to create a naturalistic language that
could have actually
> developed in real life.  To do this, I have used the linguistic data
compiled by a Dr. Patrick
> Ryan, including 90 monosyllables that he believes comprised the first
human language (or, at
> least, the one that gave rise to all that exist today).  The language will
go through several
> stages of development, with the trend being increasing affixation of
originally independent
> morphemes, and thus increasing inflection.  Progress has been good (I
think) in the main grammar
> aspects, but sorely lacking in vocabulary.  I am, admittedly, terrible in
generating vocabulary --
> I can never settle on the final word forms.  However, the point of this
post is to show a summary
> of the info for OurTongue to date, for anyone who may be interested:

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