Re: My new project - comments appreciated

On Tuesday, July 13, 2004, at 07:15 , Joe wrote:

> Interested by the more wide-ranging language-unification projects I've
> seen, I've decided to make one.  It sounds like fun.
>
> It shall be called 'Anglo-Netherlandic'(as a stopgap, until I can find a
> better name).  Essentially, its job shall be to unify English, Frisian,
> Scots, and Dutch.  An impossible task,
Why should this be impossible? Of all the continental langs, Dutch is
probably the closest to English. All the languages you've named are fairly
closely related.  A more ambitious project called IIRC Folkspraak has been
on going for many years now; it aims to unify _all_ the Garmanic languages.
  Compared with that, 'Anglo-Netherlandic' will be a doddle    ;)

Fun, it may be (and I hope it is) - impossible, no.
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On Wednesday, July 14, 2004, at 05:35 , David Barrow wrote:

> Joe wrote:
>
>> Gary Shannon wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> There is no need for the tie breaker.  Look up "ken"
>>> in a good English dictionary.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, yes, 'ken' and 'wot' are (obsolete)  English verbs, but I am
>> basing this on the modern languages.  I doubt anyone would accept their
>> use as being Standard English.
Aw - is 'ken' really obsolete now? I thought it was still alive in some of
the Lowlands and English-Scots border dialects. Did the 20th cent really
see its demise as a living word?

> except in the expression 'to wit'  'wit'  being the infinitive   'wot'
> being the present singular.
...which would make it a very peculiar English verb (only 'to be' has a
different present indicative from the form used in the infinitive).

It's true that the phrase 'to wit' still survives, at least in legalese.
But a little investigation will show that 'to wit' & 'to wot' were dialect
variants as also were 'weet(e) (Spencer, Shakespear), as well as 'wat',
'wite/wyte'. The poor verb barely made it to the modern English period &
didn't survive long enough for one variant to become the standard
inter-dialect form.
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On Wednesday, July 14, 2004, at 06:59 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:15:23 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>> Have language unifications ever
>> been done to this extent before and been adopted?
>
> Sounds remarkably like what I've read about how words for Interlingua
> were chosen, and how they determined what form the word should take.
>
> Basically, they took the four languages English, French, Italian, and
> Spanish/Portuguese (treating the last two as one since they are often
> similar) and try to find a consensus root. If they can't, they have a
> look at German and Russian as well, for their Greco-Latin borrowings
> or possibly IE cognates.
Precisely so. But because Interlingua is intended as an AIAL for those who
share a western cultural background (i.e. it doesn't have _global_
pretensions, as I understand it), the morphology has been simplified to a
greater degree than perhaps one would have done in a purely
'conlang-for-fun' common Romance project.

But IIRC it was because of projects like Interlingua & other pan-Romanic
conlangs, that Jeffrey Henning took up the inter-Germanic challenge and
initiated the Folkspraak project.

I'm fairly certain there have been projects to produce 'Inter-Slav' and
'Inter-Celtic', inter_alia  ;)

So, yep, 'language unifications' are not a new idea - but don't let that
put you off.  Have fun! You could also consider a con-history to account
for the development of 'Anglo-Netherlanic'.

Ray
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
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