Dewrad wrote:
brandrinn wrote:
I think I've put my finger on exactly why I hate weird Romlangs. Making a Romlang automatically means you are curating linguistic history. Your audience needs to be language nerds because nobody else gives a shit. So if you agonize over something like the palatization of /n/ people will appreciate it, even though it's not a particularly flashy sound change, because we enjoy diving into the minutiae of Romance diachronic phonology. In contrast, retroflexes only make sense if it is in some way related to Sardinian. Otherwise, you're ignoring all the yummy things we come to see when we read about Romlangs. It's like going to a seafood restaurant and ordering a hamburger.
Weird shit for the sake of weird shit belongs in sci-fi conlanging. Go nuts. Everybody loves Dritok.
Eu craizu ca tan amu. Antel acast post tai e lu tai d'anuant, spraime exactamant cal ca man san maçnat sanglo dele romlange.I think I love you. In this and your previous post you have articulated exactly that which I've always personally thought about romlangs.
And everything that i DON'T think. This seems to me to be a one-eyed approach, lacking a third dimension. To me, there is no point carefully replicated the 'minutiae' of things that have already happened but having them happen in a slightly different order. That's like remaking the Omen by faithfully replicating every line and shot, scene by scene. For me, the whole point of it all is exploring and lauding and embracing possibility and potential: Latin is an assembly of potential developments. I play with my Romlang ideas because it entertains me - elevates me, even - to try to bring out that potential, hiding the conventional in the exotic, and the exotic within the conventional: things that people think are weird but are actually quite sensible, and that they think are sensible but are weird underneath; and of course things that are weird right through, without which neither of the other two would be in the least bit possible. Every sound change that happened in reality is of interest only because of the sound changes that did not happen, the changes that are implied and denied. Creating a background against which romnatlangs can repose is more of a tribute to them than a slavish imitation would be.
Nor do the realists seem entirely consistent in their ideology. Almost all of them eschew the mundane for the weird. Dewrad here, for instance, has an Eastern Romance language - almost as strange as a Southern Romance language - based on scarcely-attested dialects, and has in the past specifically boasted of the weirdness of the vowel changes, iirc.
If everybody's so keen on the minutiae of attested romlangs, where are all the precise little Oeil languages set in the western Jura? Where are the "what if a romlang was spoken in northern belgium?" conlangs?
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