Re: Ancient conlang

On Thursday, January 15, 2004, at 09:40 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>>> Circumlocutions. For "hominid", use
>>> "manlike"; for "chimp" use "monkey".
>>>
>>> Email could be "lightning courrier" or
>>> similar.
>>
>> Why?
>
> Because we understand what is entailed, while a H
> speaker will not. He'd probably know what a
> message is, but not what an email is. His
> messages are hacked into clay and baked
A slightly unreal scenario, I think. I don't understand
why anyone would want to do this?

And surely by fixing the Hittite vocabulary at what we
have recovered and reverting to (strange) circumlocutions,
we are re-enforcing the erroneous notion of "primitive
language" that Paul was arguing against.

[snip]

>> We've plundered Greek and Latin in order to
>> extend our vocabulary,
>> and borrowed 'chimpanzee' from some west
>> African source.  I am not
>> aware of any evidence that Hittite couldn't
>> have similarly extended its vocabulary.
>
> Apparently so! I thought the whole point of
> John's comment was to make the thing
> understandable for a speaker of an ancient
> language.
That is _not_ how I understood Paul's reply to Gary;
I assumed John was simply making the observation that
Hittite would have to have these vocabulary items for
Paul's translation to be made.

> Not just providing a loan word that
> fits the phonology. I guess if all you want is a
> simple loan, I suggest iimeyallas.
_I_ want nothing. I was merely making the observation that
it is my belief that all natlangs have the resources to
adapt and extend their vocabulary.  Nor, if you read my
mail properly, did I ever say the only way to do this is
by having loan words which fit the phonology (as, e.g.
'chimpanzee' in English).  Languages have a variety of
ways of extending vocabulary; I do not see why Hittite
should be any different in this respect.

Ray
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