Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous?

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by WeepingElf »

2+3 clusivity wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:. . . It is extremely unlikely that the same sound changes happen twice in two different languages, and applying sound changes of one language to another always has to deal with the problem that the starting phonologies are virtually always different, so you have to bend your sound changes to make them fit.
Maybe with broad 'sound laws,' but I think taking more common sound changes isn't that bad. For example, /coronal/ + /j/ -> palatalization, palatal POA, etc. To me at least, cherry picking sound changes isn't that bad if you are looking at them as a consistent whole and not trying to use them to shepherd a phonology towards X language's phonology or phonotactics (or worse, vocabulary).
What I meant is two languages undergoing precisely the same sequence of sound changes over an extended time. Of course, it is possible and indeed not unlikely that two neighbouring languages undergo broadly similar sound changes and converge in terms of phonology, but that is not the same.
2+3 clusivity wrote:I've found that with trying to get a particular flavor to a more or less a priori lang, it is often more productive to focus on the phonotactics and clusters than sound changes. I've definitely fallen in the trap of trying to get the appropriate word feel by stepping back to a proto-lang and deriving a few words with a sound change, only to find that it obliterates other words, clusters, phonemes, etc. in the targetLang that I liked previously.
Yes. Convergent sound change is something very different than two languages undergoing the same set of sound changes. Converging languages undergo different sets of sound changes which lead to the languages becoming more similar to each other. Of course, this may occasionally involve the same kind of sound change (such as a lenition of intervocalic stops) happening in both; it happens all the time. But as far as I know, bogolangs (languages undergoing precisely the same sound changes as others) do not occur in the real world. Diaspora languages, such as the various dialects of Yiddish and Romani, are a good test case for this. AFAIK, they do not undergo the same sound changes as their host countries' languages.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Salmoneus »

You raise an interesting point when you say 'the same order'. Sound changes can spread into neighbouring languages, even from different language families (it's common for many of the major soundchanges in X to also occur in neighbouring Y - what's not normal is for Y not to have a bunch of its own soundchanges as well!), but they don't necessarily spread in the same order! One way to have interesting sprachbund effects is to put a language through (some of) the same changes as its neighbour, but have them happen in a different order (to the extent that that makes sense)... that can result in something that looks similar in one way but is quite distinct in another.

More importantly: what? There's been a secret PIE-conlanging board hidden for the last four or more years!?
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by sangi39 »

Salmoneus wrote: More importantly: what? There's been a secret PIE-conlanging board hidden for the last four or more years!?
Not "secret", just... low-key. We had 12 people sign up within the first month and a further 3 over the next 3 months (not including Thak who started the whole thing), but only 9 of us made more than 10 posts, 5 made more than 20 posts and only 2 of us made more than 50 (Thak would make that number 3). We've never been terribly active, but it's been a good place to pool resources and ideas :)
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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The Haedus Collection

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by WeepingElf »

Goatface wrote:The Haedus Collection
A useful collection. Thanks!
Goatface wrote:Now if you'll excuse me, I have to continue working on a secret project, the details of which I hope to reveal in the coming months.
You are watering our mouths ;)
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

Goatface wrote:The Haedus Collection

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to continue working on a secret project, the details of which I hope to reveal in the coming months.
Many thanks for sharing this!

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Karinta »

I'd really like to do something with Old Chinese (pref. the Baxter-Sagart). PIE is quite ridiculous - it makes Karlgren's OC reconstruction look sane.

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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Karinta wrote:I'd really like to do something with Old Chinese (pref. the Baxter-Sagart). PIE is quite ridiculous - it makes Karlgren's OC reconstruction look sane.
Aw, PIE is totally reasonable, once you've immersed yourself in it for several years.

Old Chinese is cool, I've long been fascinated by it, at least to the extent of wanting to introduce Old Chinese loanwords into IE conlangs.

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by kanejam »

Wait what's a good resource for Old Chinese? I thought not much about it was known? Or maybe I'm confusing it with proto-Sino-Tibetan?

@Goatface: yes! Do it :wink: PIE makes a lot more sense if you look at after learning a bit of Latin, the morphology (at least the nominal morphology)
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Particles the Greek »

WeepingElf wrote:But I have grown out of bogolanging. It is extremely unlikely that the same sound changes happen twice in two different languages, and applying sound changes of one language to another always has to deal with the problem that the starting phonologies are virtually always different, so you have to bend your sound changes to make them fit.
I've always felt that bogolanging is a lot like fan-fiction; it's a good way to learn about and play around with sound-changes without having to go to the lengths of creating an entire parent language, but the results should only rarely be shown in public.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Hallow XIII »

Just in case (there are many people who have made this mistake, me included) you are confusing things: bogolanging is not the same as a posteriori conlanging; a bogolang is when you take the exact sound changes of one language and apply it to another.

If you were perfectly conscious of this distinction please ignore this post.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by WeepingElf »

Inversion wrote:Just in case (there are many people who have made this mistake, me included) you are confusing things: bogolanging is not the same as a posteriori conlanging; a bogolang is when you take the exact sound changes of one language and apply it to another.
Just that. And as I have already said before, the problem with bogolanging is that no two languages have the same phonology, so the sound changes don't really fit the language to which they are applied. In reality, sound changes respond to the phonology of the language, and other languages often serve as attractors, i.e. the sound changes are shaped such that the language moves closer to those other languages.

This doesn't mean that bogolanging can't give interesting results; but most bogolangs I have seen felt rather flat.

Creative a posteriori diachronic conlanging means choosing one's own sound changes that make good and interesting use of the base language's phonological peculiarities; and of course, realistic language change involves more than just sound change.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Morrígan »

kanejam wrote:Wait what's a good resource for Old Chinese? I thought not much about it was known? Or maybe I'm confusing it with proto-Sino-Tibetan?
I don't think I've seen anything especially thorough, though I think a lot has been written about it's phonology. I do have some docs I can post later. I have a paper on Sino-Tibetan from Matisoff, a paper on the reconstruction process itself from Edwin Pulleyblank, and a stack of documents "An Etymological Dictionary of Common Chinese Characters" from William H. Baxter. I'll post it later. I was in a rush this morning and didn't turn my server back on.
kanejam wrote:@Goatface: yes! Do it :wink: PIE makes a lot more sense if you look at after learning a bit of Latin, the morphology (at least the nominal morphology)
I'm quite out of practice, but I probably spent a solid four or five years pouring over Beekes, Meier-Brügger, Ringe, and (le frustrated sigh) Szemerényi. What amazed me was when I eventually got to the point where I was thinking to myself "well, this verb system seems perfectly reasonable and quite orderly", quite in contrast to my initial impression of "dafuq is dis".
Hopefully soon I can revisit my work on Kuma-Koban, and try to start working on Malkh.

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Morrígan »

Here is what I have on the subject of Old Chinese. Also, the Wikipedia article seems to be much nicer than I recall from the past, so that's worth looking into also.

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Bristel »

Goatface wrote:Here is what I have on the subject of Old Chinese. Also, the Wikipedia article seems to be much nicer than I recall from the past, so that's worth looking into also.
Thanks! I was interested in this too. Old Chinese is pretty interesting in terms of phonology, and I was tempted to start doing a conlang based on it.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Morrígan »

I should really conduct an inventory of my PDF collection. I found these two additional documents. NB - they are much larger than most of the others, 25Mb and 50Mb

Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic (Masatovic)
Etymological Dictionary of Old-Chinese (Schuessler)

I should probably collate these and throw them into a torrent or something.

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by kanejam »

I remember downloading some of your PIE textbooks a while ago! Thank you very much for putting those up, they're excellent!
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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Jumping in rather late here (apologies if this verges into thread necromancy) -- I just wanted to say I appreciated reading the earlier post here suggesting the 'success' or 'reward' of working up a conlang from a reconstructed (nat-)protolanguage lies in the ability to compare and contrast it to its actually documented relatives, both linguistically and 'historically' (in a broad sense). I definitely feel the same way!

Unfortunately -- despite an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit :oops: -- I really have no taste for the IE family, nor background in European history/language history, which puts a good 80% or more of a posteriori conlanging discussions (let alone group projects) out of my league.

FWIW, in my own tinkering I think of there being two related but different approaches. One is to work from a (reconstructed/hypothetical) protolanguage of an actual group of natlangs, to create a new sibling -- in which case I'm relatively less concerned with being "rigorous". (Though only relatively). At least for the dismal, petty language families I favor, it doesn't take long to learn how tentative and flimsy the reconstructed protolanguages are*, and how perverse it is to limit yourself to 'proper comparative-historical linguistic rigor' in inventing a new descendant.

The other is to take an older, historically documented language and work up a more or less direct descendant of it. (E.g., a descendant of Old Georgian found in some village in Mazandaran, or a 10th century manuscript in a descendant of Gaulish). I feel like that calls for a lot more rigor, in having a good grasp of the source language on one hand and the later linguistic and social environment it survived through.

[* Assuming much reconstruction has even been done!]
CONLANG Code: C:S/G v1.1 !lafh+>x cN:L:S:G a+ x:0 n4d:2d !B A--- E-- L--- N0 Id/s/v/c k- ia--@:+ p+ s+@ m-- o+ P--- S++ Neo-Khitanese

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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by WeepingElf »

kuroda wrote:FWIW, in my own tinkering I think of there being two related but different approaches. One is to work from a (reconstructed/hypothetical) protolanguage of an actual group of natlangs, to create a new sibling -- in which case I'm relatively less concerned with being "rigorous". (Though only relatively). At least for the dismal, petty language families I favor, it doesn't take long to learn how tentative and flimsy the reconstructed protolanguages are*, and how perverse it is to limit yourself to 'proper comparative-historical linguistic rigor' in inventing a new descendant.

The other is to take an older, historically documented language and work up a more or less direct descendant of it. (E.g., a descendant of Old Georgian found in some village in Mazandaran, or a 10th century manuscript in a descendant of Gaulish). I feel like that calls for a lot more rigor, in having a good grasp of the source language on one hand and the later linguistic and social environment it survived through.

[* Assuming much reconstruction has even been done!]
This boils down on "How much do we know about that language?". Attested languages tend to be better known than reconstructed ones, though there are exceptions: we know more about Late Proto-Indo-European than we know about Etruscan, for instance. This means that if you start with a well-known language such as Old Georgian, you have a lot of facts to ground your descendant in, and you'd better go forth in a very rigorous way because otherwise, any scholar knowing your source language well can easily expose the weaknesses of your project; if you start with a poorly-known language such as Proto-Tungusic, you have more "freedom" to work with because the scholars simply don't know the source language well enough to say "Hey! That's wrong!". (As a practical example, nobody knows what the PIE "laryngeals" actually were like, so you can do almost anything with them. You can't with Latin /h/, where everybody pretty much agrees what it was.)
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by kuroda »

Agreed. It's just that, over nearly 20 years of online or in-person conlanging contacts, I've often seen people struggling to apply the standards of Latin philology to Proto-Nostratic (so to speak), in order to develop a "rigorous" a posteriori conlang. I've veered that direction myself on many occasions!
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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Morrígan wrote:The Haedus Collection

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to continue working on a secret project, the details of which I hope to reveal in the coming months.
I might want to say that this site is currently 100% borked for me. It doesn't work in the slightest and anytime I try to access it it just loads forever and spits an error at me.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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Well you'd better decide whether you want to or not, since you've done it now.
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

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You know, have you ever tried not stating everything you say in labyrinthine statements that require astounding leaps in logic and parsing to uncover the true meaning of in a vain effort to appear more intelligent than you actually are?

There is a difference between being erudite and being obtuse JUST to feign intelligence.

Inb4 you call me stupid despite intentionally crafting that statement to be a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the conversation on hand
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by ObsequiousNewt »

Chagen wrote:You know, have you ever tried not stating everything you say in labyrinthine statements that require astounding leaps in logic and parsing to uncover the true meaning of in a vain effort to appear more intelligent than you actually are?

There is a difference between being erudite and being obtuse JUST to feign intelligence.

Inb4 you call me stupid despite intentionally crafting that statement to be a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the conversation on hand
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Re: Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous

Post by Salmoneus »

Chagen wrote:You know, have you ever tried not stating everything you say in labyrinthine statements that require astounding leaps in logic and parsing to uncover the true meaning of in a vain effort to appear more intelligent than you actually are?

There is a difference between being erudite and being obtuse JUST to feign intelligence.

Inb4 you call me stupid despite intentionally crafting that statement to be a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the conversation on hand
The irony here, of course, is that both your preceding post and this one are couched in overcomplicated and underpunctuated syntax, making them hard to understand at a first glance; whereas Drydic's remark was phrased in a perfectly clear and simple manner that did not in any way lend itself to misinterpretation.

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