Re: Fakelangs

Hallo!

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 15:57:41 +0200,
Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:

> Feel free to coin a better word for "fakelangs"...)
>
> 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.
>
> The culture has its own religion, and survived past the middle
> ages as a local minority.  Often pursued as heathens, they
> sometimes had to keep their identity or at least their beliefs
> secret.  For that reason, it is not clear when exactly the
> language and culture died out.  Some fringe scientists even
> conjecture that a secret society of them might still be around.
> ;o)
As for Albic, it survives in a few small pockets (amomg others,
in the western Midlands) until today.  The modern Albic languages
are of course very different from Old Albic, having had about
2500 years to evolve since then.

> For the flavor of the language, I'd like something rough and
> ancient-looking like what is left of PIE (which strikes me as
> having lots of guttural sounds and labiovelars).  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
That's a good idea.

> 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.
>
> Any comments or advice on the premise so far?  What features
> should I avoid/add to make the language decidedly un-Germanic
> and un-Celtic, yet realistic?  No trigger stuff please...
> though ergativity and maybe even vowel harmonies wouldn't be a
> bad idea.
The conhistory of Albic is based on the assumption that the neolithic
farmers of central Europe spoke languages related to
Proto-Indo-European, one of them being the ancestor of Proto-Albic.
The protolanguage of this family, which is also the common ancestor
of Albic and Indo-European, was spoken in the area that is now
the Bay of Odessa (the northwestern part of the Black Sea, to the west
of Crimea) before the Black Sea Flood (geologists have found out
that the Black Sea basin was flooded in a large cataclysm some time
around 5500 BC, when the sea level rose above the Bosporus).
But there must have been a bewildering variety of languages spoken in
central Europe before the Neolithic, and some of them may have
survived in the Alps.  You may want to have a look at Caucasian
languages for phonological (lots of harsh-sounding consonants,
including labiovelars, uvulars and ejectives) and grammatical
(ergativity!!!) inspirations.  The Caucasus is a linguistic
wonderland, with three apparently unrelated indigenous language
families in addition to several Indo-European and Turkic languages.

This is great fun, and we could collect these "fakelangs" in a sort
of net.project.  Kind of like Ill Bethisad, but without the
alternative history, just linguistic minorities that could have been.
(Any suggestion for a name?  Perhaps "League of Lost Languages",
which would abbreviate to a juicy "LLL"?)

Greetings,

Jörg.

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