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Re: Natlangs in Fantasy Worlds

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Sunday, November 11, 2007, 8:05
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@...>