Inadvertent Conlanging

>===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
<CONLANG@...> =====
>>I was
>>really amused when I first read about Dolgopolskij's Nostratic "hunting"
story
>>-- can't imagine a better use of artificially creating a proto-language.
>
>Well, yes - I'm afraid that I also think that, along with 'Pelasgic' which
>I mentioned recently, Nostratic is an interesting conlang.
>
>>Just my two skeptical cents worth.
>
>And mine.
I still think that someone should create a web-page dedicated to Inadvertent
Conlangers, people who inadvertently create fictional languages when they
think they are reconstructing real ones.

I wish I could rememeber the book that one of my Classics profs showed us --
it was a Reconstructed Iliad, from before Perry & Lord's theories of oral
transmission became well-known, when people still looked at Homer as a
*written* work which had been added to and subtracted from while being
*rewritten* (much like the JEDP theory of the Pentateuch).

This was before it was understood that the Homeric idiom was full of formulaic
phrasings from several different dialects of Greek and several different
centuries, preserved like fossils, all mixed up together and used concurrently
by oral poets.

This book purported to give the "original" Iliad, in its original
single-dialect (Ionic I think?) form, with all the alternate forms purged, and
things modified ("restored") to fit the meter correctly.  (Of course, large
sections of it were also declared "interpolations" and removed.)  Oh, and of
course, all the digammas were restored!

This fellow gets not only the Inadvertent Conlanger's Award, but also the
Inadvertent Conliterary Award.

There are many other examples, though, I'm sure.

Ed

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         edheil@mailandnews.com
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