Re: Roll Your Own IE language

At 6:02 pm -0400 7/4/99, Tim Smith wrote:
......
>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.
I know this well  :)

>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.)
Just where I'd already put another non-IE ethnic minority (possibly related
to ancient Tyrrhenians)!  But that's got put on the back burner at the
moment.

Indeed I'm wondering whether I'm being fair to these people to put them in
that part of the world at all.  I feel they might've been "ethnically
cleansed" centuries ago.  Maybe that's why I haven't 'discovered' more
about this language - maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.

But if you want an isolated survival from an early IE lang, then maybe one
could look across to central Asia.  Perhaps a survival from Tokharian or,
maybe, a related IE dialect surviving somewhere in what is now the western
part of China.  Just a thought.

Ray.