Re: Introducing myself to the list

Fior,

Welcome to the list!  The BEST place I've found for Indo-European studies is
The Indo-European Database at http://indoeuropean.nm.ru.  It's run by a
young linguist from Moscow named Cyril Babaev, and he's not much older than
you are!  (Early twenties I think.)

Anything from him is trustworthy data.  Other webpages are put up by people
I used to be on the IndoEuropean and Nostratic lists (those lists are pretty
much dead): Glen Gordon (who also discusses his own Nostratic-type theory),
Patrick C. Ryan (whose scholarship is good but his proposal of a
Proto-Language is laughable).

My current interest concerning IE is the newer glottalic theory of
Gamqrelidze and Ivanov (the 'Soviet School' which included the late Vladimir
Ilich-Svitych, the main promoter of the Nostratic macrofamily theory); where
the Neogrammarians (the traditional reconstructionists) had p/b/bh, t/d/dh
etc. (the 'Sanskrit model'), Gamqrelidze and Ivanov have promoted an
alternative theory where the stop system is p/p'/b, t/t'/d, where C' is an
ejective (as in Georgian, Ethiopian Semitic and some Armenian and Ossetic
dialects) and the other two stops have aspirated and unaspirated allophones
(th-t, dh-d).  This pair also proposed a three-way sibilant system along the
lines of the three dorsal stop locations (palatal/velar/labiovelar), where
you have s/s^/sw (s^ is a palatized s).  This is parallel to the 'laryngeal'
theory, where three or four laryngeals are posited as H1, H2 and H3 plus an
unspecified H.  (I've seen several proposals of a three-way laryngeal system
of h/h^/hw -- the same neutral/palatal/labiovelar system of k/k^/kw, etc.!)
There's even been a back-velar or uvular set proposed -- q'/q (no voiced
counterpart) -- but it's not widely accepted.

Well I digressed a lot, but I'm full of ideas.  One of my linguistic
projects is my own version of an Indo-European language, spoken by a
fictitious people living on a fictitious island in the Mediterranean called
Callisto.  These people resemble something of a Celtic-Armenian mix
racially, and their language is a very conservative descendant of the
protolanguage.  But the language experienced a Grimm's Law-like shift, where
a Classical Armenian-like ejective/voiceless/voiced system developed.
Syncope of short vowels occurs especially with /i/ and /u/ (but with
residual palatization and labiovelarization of preceding consonants along
the lines of Slavonic and the three Gaelics).

This is the nationality of the hero of my sci-fi/fantasy novel in the works,
tentatively titled _The City of Dreams_, which takes place in the early 21st
century.  He is Alexander Mikhailovich Prokofiev, a Texan (like me!), and a
cadet in the élite military corps called the Rangers.  His best friend is a
Callistan immigrant named Eric Damien, and he is engaged to be married to
Eric's sister, Jennifer.  (That's before he, the Damiens and Alex's brother
Grigory, find themselves on their wild adventure...)

My other conlang projects are: Tech (an East African language of Nostratic
origin, spoken by a formerly nomadic people now settled on an island in the
West Indies), Quaelitz (spoken by elves in Central and South Asia), Dóh
(spoken by orcs in Antarctica) and MeLoYo, the language of amphibious humans
living along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, especially southern Louisiana
('Cajun country', of course).  Quaelitz is based on Sumerian; the other two
are isolating languages I just made up from scratch.  I don't have any
samples up on my homepage, but I'm working on it...

DaW.

My New Homepage (now for All Ages!)
http://communities.msn.com/DaWier
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