Re: Project: Contact!

On Jul 21, 2006, at 5:28 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:

> Here's a fun game:
>
> Two people who each have their own distinct conlang
> get together and devise a contact language using
> elements of both conlangs, such that native speakers
> of the two conlangs can communicate with each other in
> a basic way.
I was just thinking about doing this.  My first conlang was called
Zaraitian.  I feel it to be pretty amateurish now and would like to
some day remake it in a more realistic way.  It would have to be a
creole, though - the story of the country it belongs to is that it
was once two kingdoms (which arose from the colonies of two or three
separate foreign powers), and that when they united (or probably in
the centuries leading up to the union) their languages merged.

The problems are that I haven't yet created the languages for the two
independent kingdoms, and I really don't know anything about the
generalities of pidgins and creoles, to know how to combine them
realistically.  (Another dilemma is that those two languages are, in
the backstory of that world, distantly related, having come from one
language termed Proto-Humanic... so if I want to be really strict
about making the conlangs conform to the story, I need to construct
Proto-Humanic first, then derive distant descendants, and THEN
pidginize/creolize them.  Sounds like fun, but also a lot of work.)