brandrinn wrote:Salmoneus wrote:And speaking for the unconventionals: what's so wonderful - so compulsory - about copying French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Romanian? Those languages already exist. While it's very admirable I suppose to be able to do that, and some of these romlangs even seem quite nice and occasionally interesting - I'd far rather see something novel. There's no law that says that Latin had to evolve the way it did and only the way it did. There is, for instance, no reason why case could not have survived (though given the trend toward prepositions, I think it's fair to say that a LARGE case system would be unlikely to survive). [Likewise: in PIE, the laryngeals could have survived, and indeed did, not only in Anatolian, but in several other branches as well. As it happens they were all lost eventually, but there's nothing magic about a sound labelled 'laryngeal' that means it must disappear by dawn/485 AD.]
You're right there's no
law that, say, cases have to disappear or velars have to change before front vowels. But these are common areal features. Creating a language that has these things makes the language feel more appropriate to its terroire. You don't have to go that way, but if you completely disregard these features and strike off in another direction entirely, the question becomes: why are you making a Romlang in the first place? Just make an isolate or some a priori creation. Why would you deliberately place a language within a given linguistic heritage and then ignore everything that makes that heritage interesting? I think what Dewrad and I are saying is not incompatible with your desire for novelty. It's just that we want languages that (far from "copying" French or Italian) sound like they could realistically have evolved sandwiched between such languages for centuries.
Case survived in French for centuries - and then disappeared despite being adjacent to case-having languages. Why couldn't a Romlang in, say, the Netherlands, have retained Old French-style cases, or even expanded the case system under the influence of the surrounding germanic languages (cf Romanian)? Palatalisation of velars isn't even universal within MODERN romlangs! So how on earth can it be wrong to include such a feature in a conromlang? And when in the hell was it decreed that romlands had to be situated on the french-italian border? Sure, if your romlang is sited in Andorra, you might want to borrow a lot from Spanish and French. But if your romlang is set in, say, Senegal (the romans didn't conquer carthage until later, allowing the carthaginians to expand their trading colonies in africa, allowing romans to go conquer them later for the sake of completeness (and lower prices on their african goods) allowing a romlang to develop there after the empire fell), I don't see why 'sandwiching the language between French and Italian' is so important.
[If you want to sandwich your language between french and italian, why even bother? There's already a dozen or more romlangs sandwiched between french and italin. Why is this pointless little obsession somehow more legitimate than anyone else's pointless little obsession].
Why create a novel a posteriori conlang? Gee, I don't know, I guess you're right, this really is a total waste of time with no real-life applications. Not like creating an a priori language, or a language sandwiched between French and Italian, which make so much objective sense by all objective and universal criteria. I don't see why I didn't realise before that I'd been wasting my life on things that don't matter to you. A hint: I create a posteriori conlangs NOT because I believe there's a divine commandment to create more languages sandwiched between italian and french, but because
I enjoy it. And I think it's interesting. It's a wholly different process from creating an a priori language. With a romlang, the focus is on, for me, diachronics, and knowing the parent language and the sister languages is part of the point!
The rest of the time, this board is all for decrying repetitious yet-another-standard-average-european-language conlanging. But when it comes to romlangs, oh, woe betide anyone who does anything other than adjust most delicately two or three micrometre variables in the continuum between two more-or-less-identical-already romance languages!
Right. The linguistic landscape of the real world is not a crazy quilt where typologically utterly different languages sit side by side on a small scale. Rather, there are more or less large areas in which all languages are in some way similar to each other, and for which certain features are typical.
With a huge number of exceptions. And with plenty of room outside the quilt.
For instance, there is no Romance language with the kind of tone system we find in Chinese because such tone systems are characteristic of an area that is far removed from the former Roman Empire, and do not occur anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. The range of linguistic structures found in the area where we can expect Romance languages to exist is limited. A Romance language with Chinese-like tones may be an entertaining concept, but barring a Roman conquest of China (or a Chinese conquest of Rome) in an alternative timeline there is no way to get there (frankly, even such a conquest is not really likely to result in a Sino-Romance language - the effect of military conquests on the languages of the conquered peoples is often overrated).
On the particular point: there have been tonal languages in Europe, and there still are - a simple tonal romlang would hardly be surprising (particularly in, say, Denmark, or Britain). And complicated tonal systems are just a sahara away - a sahara which the romans did cross by land, and which the carthaginians had crossed by sea, in force. So, with the Senegal example: why couldn't a Senegalese romlang have tone?
On the general point: if centum IE languages didn't exist, you'd be busily telling everybody that they were impossible. If one tonal romlang existed, you wouldn't be able to tell people that was impossible either. If you take out Sardinia and southern Italy, you wouldn't have romlangs with initial mutations, or with retroflex plosives and fricatives (wait, doesn't Asturian have them too?), or without palatalisation, or maintaining the classical latin vowel system, and so on and so forth. but you can't tell people not to do those, because those things are real. If Spanish didn't exist, I suppose you'd be warning people about the impossibility of a romlang with /T/. But if those things can be real, in real romlangs, why can't other things be real, in real romlangs?
Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
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"I'm writing a book. It's got a boy and a girl in it and they're in love"
"Pah! Didn't you know somebody else has already written that book? Why bother?"
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!