Re: Roll Your Own IE language

At 08:27 PM 4/6/99 CDT, 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?
About a year ago I did some thinking about a possible Indo-European (or
closely related to IE) conlang.  I posted some of my ideas about it to this
list.  I envisioned it as having a nominative-accusative case system but
only two genders (animate and inanimate).  If what I think I remember
reading recently about Hittite is correct, this would imply that it split
off from PIE after Hittite but before any of the other branches of IE.  I
didn't get very far with this before other conlang ideas pushed it onto the
back burner.  In particular, I never figured out anything about where it's
spoken, or by whom, or anything about the alternate history in which it
exists.  (One possibility I thought of was to make it the language of yet
another ethnic minority in the Balkans, in a timeline not very different
from ours.)

>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.
That sounds really interesting.  I'll try to find it.

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

Get your facts first and then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain