Re: backwards conlanging
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, November 27, 2000, 15:41 |
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En réponse à Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:
>
> Does anyone have suggestions for a related-but-faux conlang technique
> for
> same?
>
In linguistics, reconstruction of protolanguages consist of two main techniques
(which often have to be used both at the same time). The first one is
comparison, which consists of comparing two or more languages supposed to have a
common ancestor to get back to this common ancestor. The second one is internal
reconstruction which consists in taking the present state of a single language
and try to find traces left in the language of an earlier state, to reconstruct
this state. It is mostly done by analysing alternations (like in French "opaque"
/o'pak/, "opacité" /opasi'te/, /k/-/s/ is an alternation) and try to find where
they come from. Of course, it's easier with inflecting languages than with
isolating or agglutinating languages. So depending on the nature of the
language, the techniques are more or less operant.
Christophe.