Re: Collaborative diachronic conlanging lite

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:59:12 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>--- On Sat, 1/10/09, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
>
>> Of the various modes and flavours of collaborative conlang
>> projects I've
>> seen I have a particular weakness for the diachronic style:
>> i.e. the
>> initiator creates an ancestral language, and other
>> participants choose one
>> of the extant langs in the project and derive a daughter.
>
>...
>
>Posted 11 NOV 2006:
>
>(NOTE: The database is still intact, but I would need to upload the scripts
since those were not uploaded last time I changed servers.)
>
>
>Subject:	Explore the Anglosic Family of languages
>From:	Gary Shannon
>Reply-To:	Constructed Languages List
>Date:	Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:51:43 -0800
>Content-Type:	text/plain
>
>Never satisfied with a single conlang, I have, so far today, created 11 new
>languages, each a member of a family tree of languages I call the Anglosic
>Languages.
>
>Now here's the fun part. You can go to my interactive web site and in about 15
>or 20 minutes create a whole language and add it to the Anglosic Family Tree of
>languages.
[...]

Ah, I'd either forgotten about that or missed it when it first came around.
 Does indeed sound like essentially the same idea.  It'd be interesting to
at least see the database, if that's not too much work.

But I note you had every single modification lead to a new language.  This
seems like it would lead to a great profusion of many very similar
languages, and they'd all blur together, too many for me to appreciate more
than a couple of them individually.  For that matter, I'd be hoping with a
project like this to get resulting languages whose diachronics would be of
interest in their own right, and this calls for a long thin family tree
rather than a fat bushy one, i.e. most modifications not branching.

More incidentally, I'd miss sound changes if they weren't present in a
project like this, and knowing you I can't be sure you even had descriptions
of phonology.  And, well, there's no accounting for taste, but with a name
like Anglosic I'm betting English was the root of the tree? -- having
English as root would be a turn-off for me.

Alex

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