Re: Old European-contact conlang

Hallo!

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 14:12:24 +0200, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Den 7. okt. 2008 kl. 11.47 skreiv Daniel Prohaska:
>
> > I'm currently developing a conlang family of a population that
> > migrated out of eastern Africa, through the Middle East, Anatolia,
> > the Balkans, along the Danube, then into what is southern France
> > today across the Pyrenees, then towards the southern tip of the
> > Iberian peninsular. Then they develop seafaring capabilities,
> > settle on the Canary Islands and from then on become a kind of
> > Atlantic version of a Polynesian-type spread across the isles of
> > the Atlantic. This migration goes on between 35 000 and 20 000
> > years ago.
> > The language will be more or less from scratch, but I want to
> > incorporate Nostratic and Old European loan words. I would also be
> > interested in any conlang that has been constructed for a similar
> > time frame and area that "my" population could have come in contact
> > with. I would like to incorporate culture-specific loan words that
> > are not already "coloured" by my own ideas, to give them a fresh,
> > "foreign" feel.
>
> I do have something from that time-frame, a paleolithic culture in
> Uriania. But in terms of language I have only a mythical ruler-list,
> reproduced at: http://www.ortygia.no/uriania/eldresteinalder-eng.html
>
> The only word with a known meaning I have from their language(s) as
> yet is "ti", which means 'land'. But it should be possible to
> reconstruct some more from the name list, and from some historical
> notes that I have.
>
> I love the idea of borrowing from each other's conlangs in cases
> where the cultures are adjacent in physical time and space. I
> probably should steal something from Jörg, as the peoples in Uriania
> of different ages have been neighbours to his, but perhaps I should
> ask permission first.
I am generally open minded towards cooperating with other
conlangers if the cooperation makes sense.  One problem with
borrowing vocabulary from Albic is a technical one: there still
isn't much online simply because it is not sufficiently worked
out.  An Old Albic thematic dictionary is currently under
construction.

It also depends on who was where at which time.  I fancy
the ancestors of the Elves hailing from the area where now is
the Bay of Odessa, fleeing west from the Black Sea Flood (which
is now dated to 6700 BC) and arriving in Britain around 1800 BC.
That's much later than the migrations of Daniel's people;
however, Albic may contain words picked up from Paleolithic
Europeans on the way, especially terms relating to local wildlife.

As for "Old European", frustratingly little is known about it.
One way of finding possible Old European words is this: take
an etymological dictionary of a Germanic language, and search
it for words without etymologies reaching deeper than Germanic.
You will find quite a few - about a third of Germanic vocabulary
has no known Indo-European roots and may be borrowed from pre-IE
languages of central Europe.  This includes, for instance, quite
a few nautical terms, includig such basics as "sea", "ship",
"mast" and "sail".

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf