Re: Fakelangs

From: "Christian Thalmann" <cinga@...>

> > (My theory is that
> > the jinn, which according to Islamic teaching, were created from
> fire, while
> > humans came from earth, are beings of energy rather than matter, but
> they
> > can materalize if they feel the need. Wasn't there a race in the classic
> > Star Trek series like that?)
>
> That would remove a lot of the verisimilitude of the current
> Techs, ne?
There's a word I never heard before, had to look it up. And you just opened
up a whole bunch of potential ideas about them. I thought of Freddy Krueger,
from the _Nightmare on Elm Street_ horror movies, which could only be
defeated if the one having the nightmare realized he wasn't real and
informed Freddy of the fact.

So are the Techs real, or do they only appear to be real in our mind? A
psychically-induced hallucination?

(Yes, I know I keep changing the ideas. I'm always 'discovering' new ideas
to incorporate.)

> > I have something in a book that claims that a number of words in
> > Indo-European are of Northwest Caucasian origin, though the Caucasus
> ain't
> > the Alps. Kabardian and Abkhaz are definitely 'rough and
> ancient-looking';
> > you could use those for a model.
>
> Thanks, I'll give them a look.  I'd like to have a certain
> amount of artistic license though.  For example, I'd like to
> give Hairo a vaguely Germanic touch, as if the Germanic langs
> had grown from a Hairo influence to PIE.  Also, I much prefer
> inflection over agglutination.
Chechen-Ingush is somewhat inflected, mainly by Umlaut-like vowel shifts.
There's a brief description of Chechen grammar online somewhere.