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Re: Roll Your Own IE language

From:Tim Smith <timsmith@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 7, 1999, 22:02
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