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

* Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> [001011 21:46]:
> 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!
Picturing your little langs running around now; small, short and still
in diapers; you go to the Conlang-Mart and they wail: "daddy, I want
nasal vowels! Bohooo!" "Nooo I wanna daddy!" and then they fight over
some cheap preclitics that you could barely afford.

I do wonder about this fascination with romancelangs though... Why
aren't "germanic language X (X not being English) develops like a
romance-lang" more widespread, or norse-celtic or gothic-sanskrit or
farsi-japanese, uhm...


t.