Re: Average life of a conlang

Logan Kearsley wrote:

> quoting Jörg Rhiemeier:
>> I know very well what you are talking about.  It is similar with
>> me and Old Albic.  Whenever I find out something about the language,
>> it feels more like *discovering* something that has always been there
>> than like *inventing* something that has never before been anywhere.
>
> I love it when that happens. Had it happen to me just yesterday, in
> fact, when I discovered the difference between formal prose and poetic
> forms of relative clauses in one of my langs.
I love it, too. So much that I actively encourage it to happen, by
giving authority to existing material and approaching the work rather
more as a medium than as a creator. This effect is reinforced by the
fact that I produced a lot of this material in my youth, decades ago,
and I don't remember the creation process well any more. Years tend
to bestow authority on any creation anyway.

Yesterday I uploaded the first online geographical information about
Uriania on http://www.ortygia.no/uriania/geografi-eng.html

Here are listed nearly all the place-names I know about. The only
ones omitted here are those that I feel certain are parts of towns.
There may be some more that ought to be removed for that reason, and
there may be a small number that has been removed mistakenly. There
are also a small number of place names I believe to exist in sources
that I haven't explored yet.

I have made careful adjustments to a few of the names. After all, the
first of them came up before I was 10 years old and some of them have
an undeniable aura of naivety about them. In some cases the Urianians
living there will have to live with that, but in others I have
tentatively decided to relieve them from it, and maybe some more will
suffer that fate. I still have the original names on paper anyway.

This work that I did yesterday also gave me another valuable insight
in Urianian linguistics. I was surprised to see so many Urianian
names in districts where Urianian isn't spoken anymore. Almost
invariably these are small places, with the exception of the biggish
town Canton - probably Kondaton formerly.

The thing with these names is that the numerous composite ones of
them don't at all show the same signs of eliding the IE composition
vowel like the ones in Uriania proper do. Formerly I thought this was
an old change and even included it in Proto-Urianian (which I have
called Old Urianian here before). Now it seems to be recent, so I
have some revising to do in my oldest texts. Onomastics, too. I guess
now the PLN Ursamsa will be Urusamsa, and the PN Ebergantos will be
Eberogantos, for example. I face a struggle with the metrics of the
poetry.

Some statistics of probable Urianian names: Byntland east: 23%,
south: 15%, west: 42%, north: 45%; Azuria southeast: 39%, but all off
shore, south: 36%, southwest: 12%, northeast: 30%, north: 36%,
northwest: 37%; Urduk region: 95%, Xeria region: 98%, rest of Uriania
proper: 100%.

LEF

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