Re: LLL Monthly Update #05/2005

That's actually a delightfully awesome idea. I wonder
how one would implement it...

--- Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> wrote:

> 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
>

-The Sock

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"


		
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