Re: Shemspreg at FrathWiki

On 3/14/07, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Dirk wrote:
> <<
> I just put the Shemspreg grammatical description on
> http://wiki.frath.net/Shemspreg . Your comments would be welcome,
> especially on layout and organization.
>
> [very kind words snipped]
>
> So what's the story behind this language?  How long have you
> been working on it?  I certainly never expected to see a PIE/IE
> language by you.
I put Shemspreg together 6-7 years ago during what felt to me to be a
glut of IE languages popping up on this and other lists (I think this
was during the rise of Ill Bethisad). I was also responding to
discussion here and elsewhere which centered around perceived
Eurocentrisms in IALs. My original intent was to make a mock-IAL that
didn't have any Romance/Germanic/Slavic/&c. bias because it went all
the way back to PIE (thus escaping various kinds of parochial
Eurocentrisms, but embracing a "pan"-Eurocentrism). But I can't
sustain satire, so it became something else. I never intended it to be
a historically plausible projection of PIE into the present day; I
just used PIE materials to create a language which I thought would be
fun to play around with. I haven't developed it any further since its
original inception, just tweaked the description a bit.

So now you know!

Dirk