Re: LLL Monthly Update #05/2005

On 6/1/05, Ph. D. <phild@...> wrote:
> 
> Now that's a cool idea. Creating a proto-language, then having
> several different people work out their version of a descendant
> language. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
> 
> --Ph. D.

I always sorta pictured a big board game, with a continents divided into big 
Risk-y pieces. Each "player" would start with a very simple language of 
there own devising... perhaps to some randomly rolled parameters. Maybe 
there are cards one deals... two players get nominative, one split-ergative, 
one ergative, one split-s, and one fluid-s. Two players get SVO, two SOV, 
and one verb-initial. And so on.

Each turn (100 year clicks, maybe), the players migrate their tribes, and 
the languages change a little. Some, I figure, according to the player's 
whim, but possibly constrained by further cards. (Vowel shift, the addition 
of tones, one more notch towards analyticity, the development of gender, 
etc.) Each player draws a few cards each turn indicating "discoveries", like 
the wheel, bronze, dogs, pyramids, etc., to beef up their vocabulary. But if 
two tribes meet along a border, they borrow all the words for the 
discoveries they lack from their neighbor, changing them to fit their own 
phonologies.

Some eventuality cards might increase or decrease the population of the 
tribe in favor of another, or maybe there's some simple sort of combat 
(poetry competition? insult fencing?), but a tribe can die out, at which 
point the player is given control of a branch of the victor's language. (Or 
a creole therebetween!) But a language never really dies, of course, because 
it's words live on, albeit mangled, in all the others.

Might be fun,
-- 
Patrick Littell
PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00
Voice Mail: ext 744
Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00

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