Re: Natlangs in Fantasy Worlds

On Nov 10, 2007 9:18 PM, Alex Bicksler <burtonlang@...> wrote:
> Well, what I actually meant was that one of the languages that
> evolves from one of the world's proto-languages is English.
I think that would be rather difficult, given the melting-pot of words
that English has become, borrowed and/or evolved from a number of
languages each with different phonotactics and morphology. For
example, explaining why most nouns pluralise in -(e)s but some words
are -is:-es (analysis) or -um:-a (datum) or -us:-i (alumnus) or ...,
while deriving from one language rather than at least four or so
(Germanic, French, Latin, and Greek) would take some work to make it
seem coherent and natural.

You'd have more success if you restricted yourself to a subset of
English, say, only Germanic words, or only Germanic and Norman-French
words, but without learned borrowings from Latin or Greek, let alone
Arabic or other languages.

Sounds like an interesting project, though -- reconstructing a
proto-language for English that does not resemble Proto-Germanic nor
Vulgar Latin!

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>