Re: How do diacronic conlangers work?

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Joseph Fatula skrev:
>> Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>>> - I have been thinking lately about how 'historical
>>>   conlangers' go about their work, and am thinking of
>>>   eventually turning the thoughts into some kind of essay. I
>>>   would appreciate what others who are into that line of
>>>   conlanging think of what I've come up with so far
>>>
>>>   - It is notably often *not* the protolanguage (the highest
>>>     node in the linguistic family tree) which was there
>>>     first in real time, but some later form which gets
>>>     labeled "classical" or some variety thereof.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Not all diachronic conlangers do it this way.  I for one always start
>> with the ancestral language and work forwards.
>
> It is good to learn that there are other ways, but this raises
> two questions for me:
>
> - Is this way of working a result of any conscious decision, or
>   is it what comes spontaneously to you?
>
> - Have you ever changed, or been tempted to change, a higher node
>   language to get or avoid some feature(s) in a lower node language?
>
> /BP
>
>
>
I'll answer the second question first, as it's a bit easier.  I haven't
really changed features in an ancestral language to change a descendant,
but I often add vocabulary to the ancestral language with a specific
descended word in mind.  What I do is start by making the framework of a
language, some basic vocabulary and grammar, but not all possible words
I might need (of course).  Later on, when I need new words for something
I'm doing with one of the descendants, I make a word in the ancestral
language and put it through the sound changes.  Sometimes I make the
word in the context of the ancestral language, while other times I come
up with the later version and work backwards through the sound changes.
Either way, I'm very interested in the naturalistic evolution of languages.

Coming back to your first question - it's a bit hard to answer.  It
seems to me that if you make up some languages for the "modern" day of
your conworld, then try to work backwards to find their ancestor, you'll
find that they don't have significant correspondences between their
vocabularies and grammars, making it impossible to derive their common
ancestor.  I suppose you could just work backwards from a single
"modern" language to its ancestor, but then when you wanted other
"modern" languages related to the first, you'd be making them through
sound changes applied to the ancestral language.  It'd still be going
forwards, not backwards.

Since you sound like you do things the other way around, do you make
multiple "modern" languages that you then derive a common ancestor
from?  Do your modern languages not have a common ancestor, but rather
each their own individual proto-language?  How far back do you go?

I don't know if you're interested, but I've been working on a family of
related languages for some time now, starting from the original ancestor
and working forwards.  I'm posting information about some of the
descendants at
http://www.geocities.com/altyaltynalma/historical/main.html.  In a
separate thread on this list, some people expressed interest in working
out what the ancestral language would be, though I don't think they'll
be able to reconstruct much of the earliest proto-language, as it's
separated from my examples by a few thousand years of weathering.

So, let's hear about your process!

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