Re: My personal project

At 12:35 pm +0100 8/3/02, Antonio WARD wrote:
>    Hi! ...   AS I have mentioned before, I would like to write a  roman
>about a supossedly ancient, pre-indoeuropean civilization that  faces an
>invasion coming from Asia (the proto-indoeuropean people). To  write
>something serious, I need to do a lot of research.   I wonder how those
>pre-indoeuropean languages might  have looked like. Basque is the only
>survivor in Europe. Does anybody know  more specifics?
Basque survives right over in the west.  It's most unlikely that only one
pre-IE language group inhabited Europe.  Indeed, Etruscan surely is
evidence that this is not so.  I know there are theories linking Etruscans
in obscure ways with IE, but they are IMO far from convincing.  Inevitably
someone will have connected Etruscan with Basque (for the simple reason
that practically every language on this planet has been linked by someone
or other to Basque!), but this can be discounted.

Many years back I did a research degree on evidence for pre-IE speech on
Crete (and there certainly was such speech) which touched on the pre-IE
Aegean area as well.  That non-IE languages were spoken in Europe before
the arrival of IE-speakers is certain; but I'm afraid the only way to know
what they were really like is to construct a time machine.

>Of course, it can be a whole set of completely new languages,  but I am
>affraid that my first try will be, undoubtedly, very indoeuropean.
Why?  The one certain thing is these languages were not like IE.

[snip]
>
>1.- Inflexions and declinations like Latin and greek.  I want to create
>new cases (besides the regular Nominative, Genitive,  etc.).
Why?

>2.- For example, I might suppress all the modal verbs to create  new verb
>modes (besides indicative, subjunctive, imperative, conditional, I  would
>create "CAPACITIVE" -I can-, "OBLIGATIVE" -I must, I should, etc). I love
>the continuos tenses in Spanish and English (I was reading, I will be
>eating).
Conditional is known only in some of modern IE languages; it's not in the
earlier ones.  Ancient Greek had indicative, imperative, subjunctive and
optative; and these AFAIK are believed to have been the ProtoIE ones.

>3.- I want my civilization to be extremely religious. So, they  would have
>an additional third person pronoun (besides he/she/it) to talk about  God
>with a special inflection for it in the third person. For example, in
>French, it
>would be something like that:
Then, presumably, they ought also to have an additional second person
pronoun & verbal affixes for addressing the deity.

Ray.


=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================

Replies