Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

[Dewrad]

There is no patent on conlang ideas. The idea that we have to stay away from any idea that's occurred to someone else before (so long as that person has posted on the league of lost languages or conlang-l, that is!) is too ridiculous for words. Besides, I'd pay any money you like that Brithenig was NOT the first romlang ever made with that premise. If my conlang is illegal, his should be too!

Actually, for what it's worth, Andrew has openly stated that Brithenig was inspired by a Welsh-like Romance "conlang" used as a hypothetical example in D.B. Gregor's Celtic: A Comparative Study. So I'll have twenty quid please.

[TaylorS]

I've never created a Romlang per se because vulgar latin bores me. I did toy with creating a descendant of Classical Latin (i.e. keeping the case system), whose main feature was the development of lexical tone. For instance the nasalization of the accusative -m became low tone and that eventually got analogized as a marker of the accusative case. I might come back to this someday - contrary to brandrinn's opinion, I am absolutely in favor of "weird" Romlangs, especially to the point of not really caring about what proto-romance actually did historically and trying *not* to be banal. There's plenty of actual romance languages out there already if you're going to be slavish about authenticity.

I've thought of doing a Romlang derived from late Old Latin/early Classical Latin (before the final -M had become mere nasalization) preserving the Nominative, Accusative, and Dative cases.

[Herra Ratatoskr]

I've too, TaylorS. I had the idea of having a small band of religious Romans sailing out and settling on the Azores, thinking it a holy isle for them, not long after Carthage was conquered. I've not worked on it for a while, but it did have some quirks that I liked, and I'll probably come back to someday.

[Yng]

I've too, TaylorS. I had the idea of having a small band of religious Romans sailing out and settling on the Azores, thinking it a holy isle for them, not long after Carthage was conquered. I've not worked on it for a while, but it did have some quirks that I liked, and I'll probably come back to someday.

Would they set out in a boat called the MAYFLOWERUM?

[WeepingElf]

There is no patent on conlang ideas. The idea that we have to stay away from any idea that's occurred to someone else before (so long as that person has posted on the league of lost languages or conlang-l, that is!) is too ridiculous for words. Besides, I'd pay any money you like that Brithenig was NOT the first romlang ever made with that premise. If my conlang is illegal, his should be too!

Actually, for what it's worth, Andrew has openly stated that Brithenig was inspired by a Welsh-like Romance "conlang" used as a hypothetical example in D.B. Gregor's Celtic: A Comparative Study. So I'll have twenty quid please.

Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to do something that has been done before. We are not in auxland, nor at the patent office. But it is always better to do something new - if what you are doing has been done before, do it in a different way. And I didn't know that Andrew was inspired by a sketch in a linguistics book.

[WeepingElf]

I've too, TaylorS. I had the idea of having a small band of religious Romans sailing out and settling on the Azores, thinking it a holy isle for them, not long after Carthage was conquered. I've not worked on it for a while, but it did have some quirks that I liked, and I'll probably come back to someday.

Would they set out in a boat called the MAYFLOWERUM?

You mean the Flos Maii?

[Nortaneous]

Why aren't there any a posteriori langs from Ancient Greek?

[Thry]

Why aren't there any a posteriori langs from Ancient Greek?

Now that you say that, do we have any Greek members here?

[Shm Jay]

Because Ancient Greek is very hard to learn, so fewer people know it.

[Cedh]

Why aren't there any a posteriori langs from Ancient Greek?

There's Philip Newton's Engadinese, which is derived from Ancient Greek with sound changes similar to those of Romansh. As far as I know he doesn't have a grammar online, but a sample text with some grammatical information (from the LCC4 relay) is here, and there are a few posts about the language on Philip's blog. He used to be an active member of the ZBB in its early days, but doesn't post here much anymore.

[Ouagadougou]

At one point, I began to sketch a Romancified Greek, that exhibited changes evocative of those displayed by the Romance languages, but I got very caught up in the pronunciation shift of the alphabet to focus on grammatical modification. The problem was in learning the darn thing, and I never got around to learning the forms of "to be" . Maybe I still have the document.

[Salmoneus]

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?

[Mr. Z]

My question, if just making an alt-history lang is so interesting, why not branch out into other families more? Especially outside Indo-European. I would love to see some Chinese conlangs (bonus if you go so far as to create an orthography using Chinese characters that includes repurposed or entirely new characters). Or, say, an extra Bantu language. Or Athabaskan, Uto-Aztecan ... anything, really.

I do have a (sketch of) a Semitic conlang for my alternative world, and another one descended from Modern Hebrew, on which I have elaborated much more. And I also have another branch of Indo-European, as do some others. At one point I also toyed with a descendant of contemporary Japanese, but it didn't go very far, and I don't think I was anywhere near competent enough to do that back then.
If somebody wants to, though, I'm willing to join on some a-posteriori conlanging project. I love a-posteriori conlanging