Kench & Para-British, was Re: Missing Listmembers...

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:36:32 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>En réponse à Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>:
>Am I completely off or is Kench a future version of English? Or is it an
>English based-creole?
Rather, a future version of Old English ;)

>Anyway I like the correspondance [D]<->[fl].
Eh? I thought the only source for Kench [fl] (word-initially) is OE <hl>.

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000 18:08:09 -0500, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

> it's a sister language to English, derived from the Kentish
>dialect of Old (?) English.
Yes, this is more correct.

Some time ago I needed an onomastic conlang for a project which I
abandoned soon. I wanted the conlang to be phonologically and
orthoepically compatible with English (at first). I thought of all
those loans from Old French, with their quite regular sound development,
and I tried to contemplate a Romance language developing like that.

Then I got into my typical trouble: the proliferation. As soon as I
asked myself what specific OFr dialect I was going to mimic, it was
too tempting to check a few variants. So very soon I had several
baby conlangs on my knees. I dubbed this nice company 'Para-British'.
Oidingese is one of the langs of this Romance-like series (the one
more strictly holding to the NW dialects of OFr).

Then I thought of the loans from Old Norse. Luckily, this is the subset
of Para-British where I advanced least. Luckily, 'cause otherwise
I'd have no less than five additional embryonic projects at present,
all screaming 'Daddy!' and wishing to be fed.

But real problems began when I recalled the cross-dialectal loans.
I sank in the sweet quagmire of OE dialectology, in all those 'second
frontings' and 'Anglian levellings'. I am still there, and I haven't
figured out yet how many conlangs I will eventually have.

Kench was the first lang in this OE-based series for which I had something
exposable (or exponible?). Since the Kentish dialect was the most deviant
one and demanded most attention. And besides, since its phonetic
development allowed for the most archaic morphosyntax (stemming from the
possibility to preserve 3 genders and 4-5 cases for the definite article).
Now I know nearly everything about its morphology, but it continues to
surprise me.

The next conlang in this group will probably imitate the Middle English
dialect of Devon. It will be the 'second most archaic', and perhaps the
most Celtic-influenced.

I still have a very foggy concept of the conworld where all these langs
are spoken... Suggestions are welcome!


Basilius