The Language Family Project

Let me wonder about it... what do we need?

a) An ancestral language at the Indoeuropean level (2000-3000 years of time
depth). This requires a list of at least 500 roots, a sketchy grammar
(inflecting? agglutinating?), some basic syntactic description (accusative?
ergative? active? - word order), a list of productive
prefixes/infixes/suffixes.

b) Also, we need some cultural informations about the ur-community: herders?
traders? what else? What was the level of development of the community? Do
we want them to be at the same level of development as the supposed PIE
peoples? We could immagine other scenarios...

c) To have migrating waves, we need some natural/cultural fact causing
them... As Danny has already remarked, IE people supposedly spread over
Europe and Near Asia after Black Sea's floods.

d) We need some daughter languages at the Proto-Germanic, Latin, Sanskrit
level. These could be worked out by a first wave of conlangers, as David
proposed. A second wave of conlangers could work at the daughter languages -
say, at a German, French, Hindi level. Obviously, if someone wants to work
out his own branch on his own, he'll be free to do it. The funniest part,
cooperation, would be anyway lost, IMHO. That's what makes relays so
actractive, isn't it?

e) If we want a whole, brand new planet, it'd be useful choosing someone who
will draw maps and such things. We'll have to decide which areas belong to
whom etc.

f) I was considering the high number of people that will probably get
involved into the project, and the even higher number of guys that will join
it in the future years: think about how many people joined projects like Ill
Bethisad or Talossa in the last year. Shouldn't it be better creating 2
language families (like IE and Semitic) interacting (as indeed IE and Sem
did): loans, and, possibly, pidgin and creoles on the family borders...
Chang will be happy to hear about pidgins :-)

Just my 2 cents,

Luca

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