zompist bboard

mark, what's the chronological order for when your langs were started? According to Langmaker:

Langmaker wrote:Verdurian - 1978
Wede:i - 1996
Kebreni - 1998
Ismain - 1999

But what about the others?

Thanks,
Ghost

I just realized this, but your name is that of a minor Matrix charactor.

Eddy the Great wrote:I just realized this, but your name is that of a minor Matrix charactor.

Er... That's not very relevant, is it?

Ghost

Ghost wrote:mark, what's the chronological order for when your langs were started? According to Langmaker:

Langmaker wrote:Verdurian - 1978
Wede:i - 1996
Kebreni - 1998
Ismain - 1999

But what about the others?

Very roughly, and ignoring revisions--

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Cadhinor - 1995
Axunashin - 1994
Xurn?sh - 1996
Elkar?l - 2002
Flaidish - 2003

I thought you had to make the proto-language first, then the decendent langs.

Eddy the Great wrote:I thought you had to make the proto-language first, then the decendent langs.

Not nescisarilly(sp)...this is conlangery after all. You can do it in whichever order you want.

It's probably far easier to do the proto-lang first.

Probably. But if you have an idea for a conlang, you don't want to spend months on another conlang before starting on it. And what if you create a proto-lang, but then want to create an even farther back proto-lang for it. To be entirely complete, you'd have to do a proto-world first....

Proto-Eastern wrote:The easiest way is to work forward. Create the protolanguage; then use the Sound Change Applier to apply a set of sound changes to each daughter language. Repeat ad nauseam.

[...]

If you're like me, you'll find yourself working backwards instead. This is much like the internal reconstruction that linguists do on real languages. You have to notice patterns that hint at sound changes and earlier regularities.

So yea, work forward, but if you have to work backwards, then be prepared for a world of work.

zompist wrote:

Ghost wrote:mark, what's the chronological order for when your langs were started? According to Langmaker:

Langmaker wrote:Verdurian - 1978
Wede:i - 1996
Kebreni - 1998
Ismain - 1999

But what about the others?

Very roughly, and ignoring revisions--

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Cadhinor - 1995
Axunashin - 1994
Xurn?sh - 1996
Elkar?l - 2002
Flaidish - 2003

What about Barakhinei?

Ghost

Oops, forgot Barakhinei. That would be 1999.

All of these dates are when the grammar was done; there may have been earlier versions, or later revisions. I had versions of Cadhinor and Barakhinei back in college. And Wede:i is getting a major go-over right now... at the moment, in fact, I'm working out sound changes for Jeori and Cuolese.

zompist wrote:Oops, forgot Barakhinei. That would be 1999.

All of these dates are when the grammar was done; there may have been earlier versions, or later revisions. I had versions of Cadhinor and Barakhinei back in college. And Wede:i is getting a major go-over right now... at the moment, in fact, I'm working out sound changes for Jeori and Cuolese.

Could you give us some rough indication of how these languages differ from ancient Wedei? Have they changed a great deal?

Oh, and is Cuolese actually descended from Wedei, or is it more of a "neice language"?

zompist wrote:And Wede:i is getting a major go-over right now... at the moment, in fact, I'm working out sound changes for Jeori and Cuolese.

Are you telling me that Wede:i might actually be getting interrogative pronouns?

zompist wrote: Very roughly, and ignoring revisions--

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Cadhinor - 1995
Axunashin - 1994
Xurn?sh - 1996
Elkar?l - 2002
Flaidish - 2003

Ooh, I'm interested in finding out what the Axunashin grammar and the Xurn?sh grammar are like.

DarkFantasy wrote:Probably. But if you have an idea for a conlang, you don't want to spend months on another conlang before starting on it. And what if you create a proto-lang, but then want to create an even farther back proto-lang for it. To be entirely complete, you'd have to do a proto-world first....

Mark discusses this issue a bit at the end of the Proto-Eastern page (here), as well as in the Secret History of Verduria (here). In his case, he had already created Verdurian and some of its relatives, but it was only after studying Earthly historical linguistics that he decided to flesh out its linguistic history and "discover" the proto-language.

[EDIT: Once again, I would encourage people to fully explore Virtual Verduria--not only the language descriptions, but the Historical Atlas, the articles on religion, and the other materials. The answers to many of the questions that people ask about Almea are already there.]

I share DF's issue: I have ideas for "present-day" languages in my conworld, and would like to have language histories and families for them as well, but doing a proper job would involve starting again from scratch and "evolving" the modern-day tongues. Ran is actually doing this with his conworld (Al-Shandur); for my part, I would like to take some baby steps with my "modern" languages before going back to tackle such a task.

Of course, as has already been said, there is no actual difference between a language and a proto-language, other than chronologically; both are fully valid languages. It's not uncommon for a conlanger to create a full-blown language, then use it as a "proto-lang" for one or more daughter languages as well. In conlanging, as has been noted, it's possible (and even necessary) to work both backwards and forwards...

p@,
Glenn

Nikolai wrote:Are you telling me that Wede:i might actually be getting interrogative pronouns?

Indeed!

So Haleza Grise wrote:Could you give us some rough indication of how these languages differ from ancient Wedei? Have they changed a great deal?

Oh, sure. I'm pretty happy with the Cuolese lexicon; and the morphology is going to be full of sound changes that make it a good deal more fusional. It's still in flux, however, so I don't want to give examples yet.

Oh, and is Cuolese actually descended from Wedei, or is it more of a "neice language"?

It's a descendant (though some of the early sound changes may well be dialectal differences).

Jeos Thegimis wrote:

zompist wrote: Very roughly, and ignoring revisions--

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Cadhinor - 1995
Axunashin - 1994
Xurn?sh - 1996
Elkar?l - 2002
Flaidish - 2003

Ooh, I'm interested in finding out what the Axunashin grammar and the Xurn?sh grammar are like.

some of us havee been waiting a long time for that

zompist wrote:

Nikolai wrote:Are you telling me that Wede:i might actually be getting interrogative pronouns?

Indeed!

So Haleza Grise wrote:Could you give us some rough indication of how these languages differ from ancient Wedei? Have they changed a great deal?

Oh, sure. I'm pretty happy with the Cuolese lexicon; and the morphology is going to be full of sound changes that make it a good deal more fusional. It's still in flux, however, so I don't want to give examples yet.

Oh, and is Cuolese actually descended from Wedei, or is it more of a "neice language"?

It's a descendant (though some of the early sound changes may well be dialectal differences).

When I read this I went into coniptions, and started squeaking. THere still not entirely done.

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Axunashin - 1994

Not wanting to nag, but what would be more exact. Which one of these came first?

Wede:i - 1996
Xurn?sh - 1996

And these...

Barakhinei - 1999
Ismain - 1999

...and these...

Ghost

Is there a reason you need the exact order, Ghost?

Ghost wrote:

Proto-Eastern - 1994
Cu?zi - 1994
Axunashin - 1994

Not wanting to nag, but what would be more exact. Which one of these came first?

Axunashin came after the other two; but Cu?zi and Proto-Eastern are effectively simultaneous.

Wede:i - 1996
Xurn?sh - 1996

Oops, change Wede:i to 1995 (sorry, simultaneous with Cadhinor).

Barakhinei - 1999
Ismain - 1999

Also simultaneous.

Maknas wrote:Is there a reason you need the exact order, Ghost?

Not really. I was just wondering.

Ghost

Good gods, Verdurian is as old as me. Well, same year, anyway. When did you actually start?

Its older than me by years...

NakedCelt wrote:Good gods, Verdurian is as old as me. Well, same year, anyway. When did you actually start?

The 1978 date is when Verdurian started... there's no real clear finish date, since I worked on it off and on for years, then redid a bunch of it in the 1990s.