brandrinn wrote:But we could just as soon use a previously made conlang, or a very obscure natlang if people promise not to google.
Oh, nope! In a community like this, nothing can be safely considered obscure enough :)
And we've had sort of problems with this in Akana, like much of a language's lexicon suddenly proving just mangled Chinese or Old Japanese. I believe such things work against the conworld's aesthetics.
Caleone wrote:I'm down with whatever I suppose. (:
Does it mean you free a slot in Team 1? Or are you just resigning from submitting a protolang? (Or maybe I understood it plain wrong?)
I still have a few questions though... How many of us are there (including me), who's making the proto-lang and which are the teams and its members?
Noone has objected to Brandrinn's proposal so far:
brandrinn wrote:Team 1: Caleone, Rorschach, cedh audmanh, Earthling, Dhokarena, treskro
Team 2: Darkgamma, the duke of nuke, caedes, brandrinn, Basilius, and the last slot will remain open for whoever is the next person to sign up
Then WeepingElf joined Team 2, and noone objected to that either, and I for one am glad I'm in his company :)
I'm not quite sure what Caleone meant, but I guess six does not need to be the final number?
L'alphabētarium wrote:Plus, we have to be really careful with this, no too much "creativity" to the proto-language and its daughters that might get them too far away from their mother.
dhokarena56 wrote:Oh, you worry too much. A little creativity is fine!
Actually, that's exactly what I wanted to warn people against. *Creativity*.
We all want our creations to look unique, and to explore unusual scenarios etc., but a higher priority in a *team play* is that players should be able to *understand* each other's plots *correctly*. It's a challenge, and a different one.
I've had some experience of coping with languages left from the first Relay, and was surprised by the abundance of things like devoicing restricted to *intervocalic* position, unrestricted [ʔ] -> [p], case markers implying protoforms slightly different from those found in the official protolanguage, innovative morphology (like agreement in adjectives) popping up out of nowhere, etc. etc.
*Please don't do things like those*. After all, chains of quite trivial sound changes can produce weird-looking outcomes anyway, morphology will erode and get mangled without much special effort, etc. And it's not supposed to be the last conlang in your life. Be merciful to your playmates :)
And another priority has to do with the subsequent integration in the pre-existing conworld. In particular,
brandrinn wrote:-Do these languages have any intermediate forms?
Don't try to do 3000 years worth of sound changes at once. Figure out some intermediate steps. We may even want to have sub-families, maybe.
- yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, and yes, and yes.
Perhaps it should not be considered mandatory, but it would be *extremely* helpful if players compose at least very brief descriptions (*not* to be made public until the end of the game!) for the intermediary stages (ideally, separated by 500 years or less).
Also, I believe 3000 years is the upper limit; if you think you can fit something curious (and obscuring the features of the protolanguage substantially) in just 1000, do it.
Darkgamma wrote:Darkgamma is actually making a conlang as of now, and for all of you that complain about 25 consonants, it has 42 and a near-horizontal vowel system :D
Spoiler detected! ;)
