Shanstanya (was: Old Languages)

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 03:51:37PM +0100, Dan Jones wrote:
> And now, I present the language I've been working on for about a month or
> so: Shanstanya.
Oooh... what a neat idea!  With all of these Celtic conlangs and Romance
conlangs and such (no offense, I think those are neat too) around, I've
wondered why the lack of Indic conlangs, I've really wanted to see one ;)

> It has lost the retroflex/dental and the palatal/velar distinctions, and
> most of the voiced aspirates have become fricatives (yes, this was inspired
> by Andrew's comment a while ago).
So it sounds like a native speaker of English trying to speak an Indian
language, then? ;)

Just kidding.

But seriously, my knowledge of Indian historical linguistics is lacking
a bit as well, so maybe this isn't entirely correct either, but it was
my impression that the retroflex/dental distinction rose under Dravidian
influence.

So, maybe it might be more proper to say that it didn't lose it, but
just never developed it? (Which might affect some of your sound changes,
I really have no idea.)

> Shanstanya does not posess gramattical gender, it distinguishes four cases
> (nominative, instrumental, locative and genitive) and two numbers. Verbally,
> there are only four tenses- present, past, imperfect and future and there is
> only the indicative mood. Auxiliaries such as warton (f. vartate) and iston
> (f. stha) are used to indicate other nuances.
Ah... what happened to Sanskrit's !@*#$*$ number of cases, and the dual
number?

OT, I think the dual number is neat, I think I could use it in English
sometimes. :)  That and an inclusive/exclusive 'we'.

> It is written in a fully alphabetic script, derived from Brahmi, named
> Licityan.
Oooh... scripts!

When you post some samples, please post a link to a sample of this script,
too :)

Just out of curiosity, do you have a concultural reason why an alphabetic
script rose, instead of a syllabary like the real Brahmi-spawn?
(Not to say it couldn't happen, just curious)

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