Re: Fakelangs

Christian Thalmann wrote:

> Reading about conlangs that pretend to be part of Earth's history
> rather than a con-Earth's, like Dirk's Tepa/Miapimoquitch or Joerg's
> Albic, has always intrigued me.  I'm tempted to make one of those
> langs myself, maybe even complete with a web page from an imaginary
> language institute presenting some gathered data "reconstructed"
> from old engravings and written accounts dating back a few centuries
> when actual speakers of the language were still known to exist.
Yes, that sort of thing is fun. Dirk's language is a good example; likewise
Matt Pearson's Tokana.  Jan van Steenbergen's Hattic (or is it Vozgian [or
both?]), IIRC, has a very nice and very authentic-sounding con-history; and
I believe he has had inquiries from Polish speakers as to just what sort of
dialect his Wenedyk is!!

Borges is the past master at creating this sort of thing, complete with
authentic-sounding footnotes.

Just make your description as dry and academic as possible. :-)))

On the other
> hand, it should be very non-PIE, predating all other languages in
> the region (Germany or Switzerland? ;-).  I could find a few
> German or Swiss-German proper names with uncertain etymologies,
> and claim that they actually descended from my lang.  =D
>
> I haven't decided much yet, except that I'd like to have a
> labiovelar consonant series, aspirated /hr hl/, and initial
> clusters like /xt ft st/.  I've decided that /gwi:n/ should mean
> "cattle", and that /'hajro/ is either the name of a Goddess or
> the language itself.
Given that area,  Rhaetian, and supposedly related  Etruscan, Lemnian, et
al.??  Vasconic?  Too bad the "PreGermanic"  "Nordwestblok" site has
vanished.

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