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

Museum for the best conlanging and conworldery threads. Ask mods to move threads here.
User avatar
Dewrad
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 1040
Joined: Wed Dec 04, 2002 9:02 pm

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

Post by Dewrad »

Salmoneus wrote: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.
Some useful Dravian links: Grammar - Lexicon - Ask a Dravian
Salmoneus wrote:(NB Dewrad is behaving like an adult - a petty, sarcastic and uncharitable adult, admittedly, but none the less note the infinitely higher quality of flame)

TaylorS
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 557
Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2008 1:44 pm
Location: Moorhead, MN, USA

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

Post by TaylorS »

con quesa wrote: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.

User avatar
Herra Ratatoskr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 308
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 5:26 pm
Location: Missouri (loves company!)

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

Post by 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.
I am Ratatosk, Norse Squirrel of Strife!

There are 10 types of people in this world:
-Those who understand binary
-Those who don't

Mater tua circeta ibat et pater tuus sambucorum olficiebat!

Yng
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 880
Joined: Fri Jul 03, 2009 3:17 pm
Location: Llundain

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

Post by Yng »

Herra Ratatoskr wrote: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?
كان يا ما كان / يا صمت العشية / قمري هاجر في الصبح بعيدا / في العيون العسلية

tà yi póbo tsùtsùr ciivà dè!

short texts in Cuhbi

Risha Cuhbi grammar

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

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

Post by WeepingElf »

Dewrad wrote:
Salmoneus wrote: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.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

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

Post by WeepingElf »

YngNghymru wrote:
Herra Ratatoskr wrote: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?
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

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

Post by Nortaneous »

Why aren't there any a posteriori langs from Ancient Greek?
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

Thry
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2085
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2011 12:15 pm
Location: Spain

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

Post by Thry »

Nortaneous wrote: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
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 823
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2002 11:29 pm

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

Post by Shm Jay »

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

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

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

Post by Cedh »

Nortaneous wrote: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
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 63
Joined: Mon Aug 29, 2011 3:25 pm

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

Post by 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.

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

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

Post by Salmoneus »

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?
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Mr. Z
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 430
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2011 2:51 pm

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

Post by Mr. Z »

Ollock wrote: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 :D
Přemysl wrote:
Kereb wrote:they are nerdissimus inter nerdes
Oh god, we truly are nerdy. My first instinct was "why didn't he just use sunt and have it all in Latin?".
Languages I speak fluently
English, עברית

Languages I am studying
العربية, 日本語

Conlangs
Athonian

Post Reply