Aposteriori idea exchange

[bradrn]

I have had a very bad day today (but I am already recovering now, though I need a quiet weekend to get into balance again).

Ah, my sympathies. It happens… hope you get the peace and quiet and that it helps.

[WeepingElf]

I’m really surprised to hear this. I feel like just a couple of days ago you were talking about them as normal?

It has to do more with my mood swings than with internal plausibility issues. I have had a very bad day today (but I am already recovering now, though I need a quiet weekend to get into balance again). The Elven civilization stretches the limits of the historically plausible (which it would do in any place of the world), though it actually makes some things make sense. And as for the language, the Proto-Hesperic language of the Bell Beaker people from which Old Albic descends may have been influenced by a Para-Kartvelian substratum spoken by the Neolithic farmers of Central Europe, who seem to have been genetically similar to modern Georgians, so a Para-Kartvelian language (or one just typologically similar to Kartvelian) in Neolithic Central Europe is not entirely implausible.

What is so unique about their civilization?

Their degree of enlightenment, which seems anachronistic about 600 BC (though the ideas shone up already back then, but were not put into practice). They manage to establish a democracy, even with women suffrage and without slavery, unlike ancient Athens; also an economic democracy - the means of production are owned by the people who work with them, either individually (the classic model of the freeholder or self-employed artisan) or collectively (for larger enterprises such as ships, where the ship is collectively owned by the crew, with an elected captain), and all that.

[þeprussianfrog]

I have had a very bad day today (but I am already recovering now, though I need a quiet weekend to get into balance again).

I'm sorry about that. Hope you recover soon!

[WeepingElf]

I have had a very bad day today (but I am already recovering now, though I need a quiet weekend to get into balance again).

Ah, my sympathies. It happens… hope you get the peace and quiet and that it helps.

I'm sorry about that. Hope you recover soon!

Thank you both. I already feel a bit better now. And I think I shall carry on with the Elvenpath, the Old Albic language and all that!

[þeprussianfrog]

It has to do more with my mood swings than with internal plausibility issues. I have had a very bad day today (but I am already recovering now, though I need a quiet weekend to get into balance again). The Elven civilization stretches the limits of the historically plausible (which it would do in any place of the world), though it actually makes some things make sense. And as for the language, the Proto-Hesperic language of the Bell Beaker people from which Old Albic descends may have been influenced by a Para-Kartvelian substratum spoken by the Neolithic farmers of Central Europe, who seem to have been genetically similar to modern Georgians, so a Para-Kartvelian language (or one just typologically similar to Kartvelian) in Neolithic Central Europe is not entirely implausible.

What is so unique about their civilization?

Their degree of enlightenment, which seems anachronistic about 600 BC (though the ideas shone up already back then, but were not put into practice). They manage to establish a democracy, even with women suffrage and without slavery, unlike ancient Athens; also an economic democracy - the means of production are owned by the people who work with them, either individually (the classic model of the freeholder or self-employed artisan) or collectively (for larger enterprises such as ships, where the ship is collectively owned by the crew, with an elected captain), and all that.

An Athens-like democracy but with women suffrage does seem potentially possible to me, no slavery on the other hand sounds a lot less so.

[Raphael]

Belated well-wishes from me, too, WeepingElf!

[þeprussianfrog]

Sinosphere Indo-European

Basically, an Indo-European group migrates into East Asia, settles, falls under China's sphere of influence and ends up being written with Chinese characters and acquiring a massive layer of Sino-Xenic influence.
Indo-European with its own numerals being completely replaced with Chinese numerals, yaaaaay!

[WeepingElf]

I have some ideas for Indo-European languages representing lost branches besides the aforementioned Hesperic branch, my main project.

1. Two Continental Celtic languages, one in the western Alps (near Mont Blanc), one in the eastern Alps (near the Hohe Tauern), both with SVO word order and no initial mutations (though the western language has a lenition similar to Western Romance, while the eastern one has some vaguely Slavic-like changes, resulting in a rich sibilant inventory) - a reply on Dewrad's Arvorec.
2. A Romance language in the Black Forest, intermediate between Lorrain and Rumantsch (no High-German-like sound shift) - a reply on my own (abandoned) Germanech.
3. A highly conservative Romance language made by applying the sound changes of Quenya (in an appropriately adapted version) to Latin, spoken perhaps in the Azores, brought there by a ship crew that was blown far off course on their way from Britannia to Hispania in Roman times.
3. Colchidic Greek, spoken somewhere in Georgia, with a Georgian-like phonology.
4. Two sister languages of Tocharian, one in the Sayan mountains and developing agglutinating morphology with vowel harmony, one at Dunhuang, Gansu, converging typologically to Chinese: isolating, monosyllabic, tonal - with tone ablaut.
5. Modern Cappadocian Hittite.

Alas, I have enough to do with my main conlang project and other matters, s don't expect seeing any of these soon

[þeprussianfrog]

I have some ideas for Indo-European languages representing lost branches besides the aforementioned Hesperic branch, my main project.

1. Two Continental Celtic languages, one in the western Alps (near Mont Blanc), one in the eastern Alps (near the Hohe Tauern), both with SVO word order and no initial mutations (though the western language has a lenition similar to Western Romance, while the eastern one has some vaguely Slavic-like changes, resulting in a rich sibilant inventory) - a reply on Dewrad's Arvorec.
2. A Romance language in the Black Forest, intermediate between Lorrain and Rumantsch (no High-German-like sound shift) - a reply on my own (abandoned) Germanech.
3. A highly conservative Romance language made by applying the sound changes of Quenya (in an appropriately adapted version) to Latin, spoken perhaps in the Azores, brought there by a ship crew that was blown far off course on their way from Britannia to Hispania in Roman times.
3. Colchidic Greek, spoken somewhere in Georgia, with a Georgian-like phonology.
4. Two sister languages of Tocharian, one in the Sayan mountains and developing agglutinating morphology with vowel harmony, one at Dunhuang, Gansu, converging typologically to Chinese: isolating, monosyllabic, tonal - with tone ablaut.
5. Modern Cappadocian Hittite.

Alas, I have enough to do with my main conlang project and other matters, s don't expect seeing any of these soon

Neat thoughts!

1. I had an idea of phonologically French and Arpitan-influenced Gaulish descendant, spoken somewhere around OTL France-Switzerland-Italy border area, but then ditched it largely for Galatian since that seemed more interesting to me at the time.
2. 3. Are interesting. I do like the idea of unconventional Romance languages. Myself had a thought of African Romance dialects surviving in Lebanon, Greece and Malta (due to Christian Romance-speaking populations migrating northeast after the conquest of North Africa) and the last British Romance dialects persisting in the Scilly archipelago and Wight Island.
4. I once had a somewhat silly thought of Tocharian-speaking nomads doing a Hungary-esque migration to Northern Italy. Speaking of nomads...

[þeprussianfrog]

Yeniseian

Yeniseian is a language family with lots of fascinating theories about. From "Huns were Yeniseians" to the proposed Na-Dene and Burushaski links... While all of this is debatable and debated, this for sure opens a broad room of conlanging possibilities.

1. Modern Hunnic
Simple: a Yeniseian language spoken somewhere far from their Siberian homeland (likely either Eastern Europe or Central Asia) intended to be the surviving language of the Huns, nomadic confederations that migrated to various places during Late Antiquity. (The word "Huns" is kinda generalising and probably included a variety of different groups, even if we're talking the most famous case (Attila's empire), let alone Central Asian ones like Hephtalites. And it isn't clear whether any, let alone all, of them were Yeniseian speakers...).

2. American Yeniseian/Asian Na-Dene
Exploring the idea of Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, either a Yeniseian language spoken in North America or a Na-Dene language spoken in Asia. Or maybe even an entirely new third branch...

[þeprussianfrog]

Siberian lingua franca

A lingua franca of alternate history Siberia/North Asia which avoided external conquest and ended up consolided by a native group while remaining significantly multilingual. Yeniseian? Uralic? Turkic? Tungusic? Anything else? An auxlang, maybe?

[þeprussianfrog]

Polysynthetic global lingua franca

Inspired by a discussion somewhere on Reddit I once saw, which argued polysynthetic languages were on decline globally, largely due to colonialism.

(And unfortunately, while it is definitely an overgeneralization and oversimplification of things globally, most polysynthetic languages are definitely either threatened, have few speakers and/or limited official recognition.
The only examples of countries I can think of where the majority of population speaks a polysynthetic language are Paraguay (Guarani) and Abkhazia (Abkhaz), and either of those cases is complicated in its own way.)

This inspired me of an idea, which is more of an alternate history thing I guess than directly a conlang thing, but: alternate timeline where a polysynthetic language (any of them) is a global lingua franca (like English in OTL) and influences most languages of the word at least to the degree English does in our world (which varies greatly, but you get the point: hard to find a language without at least some English loanwords nowadays).

How does it influence the languages of the world and how did globalisation influence the vernacular of its native speakers?

P.s. yes, I know that defining languages as "isolating/agglutinative/fusional/polysynthetic" is A LOT more complicated than it's usually considered to be, and many definitions are blurry. Still, interesting to explore scenarios where global lingua francas are very different from what we got in our timeline.

[bradrn]

(And unfortunately, while it is definitely an overgeneralization and oversimplification of things globally, most polysynthetic languages are definitely either threatened, have few speakers and/or limited official recognition.
The only examples of countries I can think of where the majority of population speaks a polysynthetic language are Paraguay (Guarani) and Abkhazia (Abkhaz), and either of those cases is complicated in its own way.)

Hey, what about Greenland?

[þeprussianfrog]

(And unfortunately, while it is definitely an overgeneralization and oversimplification of things globally, most polysynthetic languages are definitely either threatened, have few speakers and/or limited official recognition.
The only examples of countries I can think of where the majority of population speaks a polysynthetic language are Paraguay (Guarani) and Abkhazia (Abkhaz), and either of those cases is complicated in its own way.)

Hey, what about Greenland?

Oops, forgot about it! True, true.
And well, also a nuanced case as the other 2 are.

[bradrn]

(And unfortunately, while it is definitely an overgeneralization and oversimplification of things globally, most polysynthetic languages are definitely either threatened, have few speakers and/or limited official recognition.
The only examples of countries I can think of where the majority of population speaks a polysynthetic language are Paraguay (Guarani) and Abkhazia (Abkhaz), and either of those cases is complicated in its own way.)

Hey, what about Greenland?

Oops, forgot about it! True, true.
And well, also a nuanced case as the other 2 are.

Yes, though a Greenlandic friend tells me that no Danish is required these days — you can do everything in Kalaallisut (and most people do, by the sounds of it).

[þeprussianfrog]

Hey, what about Greenland?

Oops, forgot about it! True, true.
And well, also a nuanced case as the other 2 are.

Yes, though a Greenlandic friend tells me that no Danish is required these days — you can do everything in Kalaallisut (and most people do, by the sounds of it).

That's very cool!

[þeprussianfrog]

Thinking on global polysynthetic lingua franca possible timelines...

Brazil's Tupi-based lingua francas survive as dominant, and Brazil perhaps becomes a globally influential power as USA did in OTL..?

(AFAIK though, even modern Nheengatu at least is a whole lot less polysynthetic than Old Tupi, and if it is becoming globalized...)

[bradrn]

Thinking on global polysynthetic lingua franca possible timelines...

Brazil's Tupi-based lingua francas survive as dominant, and Brazil perhaps becomes a globally influential power as USA did in OTL..?

(AFAIK though, even modern Nheengatu at least is a whole lot less polysynthetic than Old Tupi, and if it is becoming globalized...)

Terry Pratchett’s Strata has, as I recall, a Viking–Ojibwe confederacy conquering Europe.

[WeepingElf]

Neat thoughts!

Thank you!

[þeprussianfrog]

Nahuatl is polysynthetic.
Maybe something with it?
Also, maybe something with Yeniseian once again? Yeniseian-speaking nomads first making this family the dominant one in the steppes, parts of Eastern Europe, maybe Iran/Anatolia/parts of India (roughly like what Indo-Iranians did first and then Turks repeated, basically), and then getting their own version of Genghis conquering all of it and beyond?