Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> I was personally somewhat shocked when David Oddsson said at the
> festivities for the NATO summit in Washington that Iceland was the
> world's oldest democracy.  I mean, am I incorrect that the Althing was
> just a local courthouse for virtually all of the last millennium?  I had been
> under the impression that all real power since 1380 had been concentrated
> in the Danish monarch.  Does Iceland really have that strong of a nationalist
> movement?
>
> ObConlang:  does anyone's constructed realities have nationalist movements
> centered around their constructed languages?
Actually, mine does somewhat, though it doesn't come up much in the story
it's tied to (all sorts of neat conlang stuff will probably make it in
only as an appendix, alas).  There's a region that speaks Chevraqis, but
the spectrum goes something like El-Jheyun to Avrezin to Qenar.
El-Jheyun strictly uses logographs and remains a theocracy.  Avrezin lost
its own theocracy due to a political crisis some centuries back, but
logographic writing still has a "prestige" image and the alphabetic
system, which originated in Qenar, sees use among the nouveau riche but
less so among the older noble families and scholars.  Avrezin also takes
a number of loan words from the western nations near El-Jheyun (I haven't
actually worked out dialects in anything resembling detail--I'm still
working on Chevraqis' ancestor tongue) and a few odd ones from the
Summersea Islanders, who conduct trade through Avrezin's ports.

Qenar, OTOH, was once a territory of Avrezin's while Avrezin was a
semi-monotheistic theocracy, and resents it like hell.  The Avren
dominance not only got Qenar's cantons to unite, but led to a rejection
of many Avren things.  Most Qenaren refuse to use the two logographic
scripts and steadfastly use the alphabet developed by some
magistrate-scholar.  Ironically, the only classes in Qenar likely to use
Avren/El-Jheyun writing are certain upper-class segments of society that
see Avrezin as a cultural center and leader, and the magistrates (Qenar's
scholarly class, once a sort of a priesthood, but which secularized in
reaction to Avrezin's dominance).  Loan words from the islander tongue
are rare since Qenar is landlocked; there is also a considerable amount
of vocabulary borrowed from the eastern horse nomads who have
occasionally swept through, and this vocabulary is often not intelligible
to non-border Avren.  There's also considerable influence from Bereshen,
a marshland country whose language systems I haven't even tried to handle
yet, though it might be fun to toss in an isolate.

Now that I think about it, it sounds like a badly shuffled version of
Korea, China and Japan.  Oh well.  :-p

YHL
(bet that was more than *anyone* wanted to know)