Re: The League of Lost Languages (was Re: Fakelangs)

I guess I'm not done with my response, here.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>

Jo:rg writes:
> > 1. [Teonaht] is spoken by an entirely fictional non-human race.
What do you mean by "fictional"?  Because your lost languages will be
fictional as well, even though they are parading as fact.  Teonaht minus the
Black Sea and the melting could "parade" as fact.  Teonaht plus the Black
Sea and the melting could "parade as legend."

> > 2. It is spoken in an entirely fictional country which winks into
> >    and out of existence in a very counterfactual way.
I think there is something you don't quite understand about my many uses of
Teonaht, and frankly I'm a little taken aback that you would exclude me and
my language project from something on the basis of the various creative ways
I employ it--or that you think that I employ it *monolithically.*  Teonaht
has several fictional "venues": the myth that it is a different world
altogether, the myth that its people melt into and out of this world; the
fact that it is a rich (invented) language that has many Indo European roots
and borrowings (some being from Eurasia and the Middle East), and the
ductile way I use it, and its very different use in a novel I'm writing.
I'm not uncomfortable with these contradictions.  You seem, however, to want
to "fix" Teonaht within one of my several schemas of explaining it.

> > The League of Lost Languages is about the survival of languages that
> > existed or could have existed in the world we live in,
There you go!

 but disappeared
> > without leaving any living descendants.
Where are Teonaht's "living" descendents?

The idea is that in the LLL
> > world, some languages survived that died out *here*, without changing
> > the world more than necessary to accomodate the languages in question.
Now that's toying with the butterfly effect, and already you are calling
upon some fictional tropes, here.

Why not include all of Ill Bethisad?  That, however, is an alternate
history, but medieval Kernu, for instance, could be employed creatively in
this respect.  What if Padraic were to say that he could supply some
articles on the existence of this once extant dialect and the remains of its
literature, especially its romances about King Mark?  His world is more
fixed, however, than even Teonhea, and he might not agree. The thing about
Teonhea is that it is both a legend of a language and a people AND a world
where that legend becomes a reality... sometimes.

> > Examples include European languages of pre-Indo-European origin,
> > modern East Germanic languages, fictional branches of Indo-European,
I've already commented on this.

ciao,
Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html