Re: Changes of conlangs and their speakers (was Re: Skerre Play Online)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
>
>On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:32:49 -0500, Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> Unlike Skerre, Olaetian hasn't changed much since the early years, and I
>> can probably still read the early texts.
>
>Old Albic started out as Nur-ellen, a descendant of Sindarin spoken by
>Tolkienian Elves in the modern world.  Some of you probably still remember.
>Since then, both the language and the nature of its speakers changed a lot.
Thagojian has been rebuilt from the ground up several times.

First, it was a consonant-rich, vowel-poor monstrosity of Techian proportions,
vaguely Nostratic, with morphological processes centered on shuffling vowels
(in a Semitic way) and masses of consonant mutations (in a way similar to but
more insane than Celtic). I *think* there were 288 consonantal phonemes, some
bi- or tri-segmental, and 3 vowels, /i/, /A/ and /Q/. The orthography was
perfectly regular, but horrific (including s-overdot for /x/ as I recall).

This was torn down, keeping the name, a few of the phonemes, and some the prefix
system, which were grafted onto Wenetaic, which was a broadly IE language with
vocabulary derived ad-hoc from PIE instead of via sound changes. It was rather
inspired by Elamite, with obligatory person marking on nouns, with a system of
"directionals", which were a *huge* matrix case / postposition sytem that was
utterly ill-concieved.

This was torn down again, keeping roughly the same phonology, into a language with
a much smaller set of cases (around nine, IIRC), a lack of the classifier
prefixes, a rather Greekoid phoneme system, vowel harmony, and a vocabulary
derived more or less by eye from PIE based on a general set of guidelines more
than rules. It retained the obligatory person/gender marking on nouns.

That was torn down one more time, at least in body if not in spirit, and Thagojian
now has roughly the same phonology, an even smaller set of cases (just three),
three-class instead of two-class vowel harmony, a vocabulary that will be
derived absolutely regularly by rules from PIE by using schcompile, and the
ever-present obligatory person/gender marking.

Fallen by the wayside are Wenetaic, Meynian, mQlo`, Polyparlish, Common, and very
probably Tsa'in, though I may come back to the latter. There are doubtless
other casualties I have forgotten...



Paul

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