Re: Roll Your Own IE language

On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Edward Heil wrote:

> Has anyone out there tried to construct a new Indo-European language, the way
> that Brithenig has been constructed as a new Romance language?
>
> I'm reading a great book, _Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics_, by
> Winifred P. Lehman.  (only $25 in paperback!)  It has a wonderful sketch of
> the structure of the Proto-Indo-European language, and in the back of my mind
> is the idea of using it in a conlang -- either filling in the gaps to make a
> usable conlang out of what we know of PIE, or making up some sound-change
> rules and so on to try to make my own IE lang.
I've pondered such a beast several times; but I've never been satisfied by
the works the university has available on PIE, and I've let it lie.  I've
never gotten beyond a few items of vocabulary.  Other projects quickly
filled the vacuum.

I'll have to look into this book, though.

A completely unrelated project of many years ago yielded a place name
rendered into two related IE langs: "Moru Nyolligam Hamdaramt" (Tallarian)
and "Avenetrent un-moru~ un-vorru~" (Angeran); meaning "meeting of river
and mountain".  The names were carved into a marker stone along with a
third language whose name for the place was not related to these two, and
it is not an IE lang (let alone a human lang).

The two IE langs in question appear to be affected by the same substrate
language (which is not equivalent to the third language of the
inscription), as both use the same nonIE roots for mountain [*(u)ollo] and
river [*moru].  In Angeran, -ll- becomes -rr-: ta~ averrun, "that I will";
as opposed to Tallarian: ta nyellem.  Moru Nyolligam either reflects bad
separation of two words around a gen. pl. ending, or perhaps some kind of
mutation; probably the latter, especially since "ta nyellem" shows the
same phenomenon with the same letters [ -m uV- --> nyV-].

I think they can be analysed thus:
moru  + -am     uollo    + -am     ham  + dar             + a + mt
river [gen.pl.] mountain [gen.pl.] come [middle affix(?)] ?   ppl.

The affix may be -dara-, especially if related to -tre- below.

a          + vene + tre             + nt  un- + moru + ~  un- + vorru + ~
[vbl.ptc.] come   [middle affix(?)] ppl.  ?     river gen ?     mt.   gen

The prefix un- may have been a genitive formation of some sort.  I don't
know how old the marker stone (actually a carved figure) is, but a guess
of 1000 - 2000 years would not be out of line; considering the world it
is found in.  The inscriptions represent an archaic level of each
language, which is a level or so older than the form of the languages now
only used in sacred and magickal texts.  Not a whole lot unlike Archaic
Latin v. Early Classical Latin.

Padraic.

>
> Ed
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Edward Heil .......................... edwardheil@usa.net
> ---------------------------------------------------------
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