Re: The Language Family Project

    Did you post this to the webpage?  If not, I think you should.

-David

In a message dated 8/2/01 9:46:31 AM, mangiat@TIN.IT writes:

<< 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 :-) >>

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