Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous?

[Chagen]

whereas Drydic's remark was phrased in a perfectly clear and simple manner that did not in any way lend itself to misinterpretation.

It was a non sequitur that had no context and was utterly pointless. Stop dancing around that fact and acting like it doesn't exist.

The site doesn't work for me. That's all I said.

I have no idea why you assholes feel the need to act absurdly enigmatic around me. Just say what you mean, holy fuck. You are not making yourself look intelligent, you are coming off as an autistic shithead.

[Yng]

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

I suggest you carefully reread first the post straight before Drydic's and then Drydic's. It makes perfect sense, even if it is slightly facetious.

[Pinetree]

[quote="Chagen"][quote]whereas Drydic's remark was phrased in a perfectly clear and simple manner that did not in any way lend itself to misinterpretation.[/quote]

It was a non sequitur that had no context and was utterly pointless. Stop dancing around that fact and acting like it doesn't exist.

The site doesn't work for me. That's all I said.

I have no idea why you assholes feel the need to act absurdly enigmatic around me. Just say what you mean, holy fuck. You are not making yourself look intelligent, you are coming off as an autistic shithead.[/quote]

Perhaps you need to interpret it as Drydic responding to the post immediately prior to yours. It makes much more sense that way.

[quote="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![/quote]
[quote="Drydic"]Well you'd better decide whether you want to or not, since you've done it now.[/quote]

EDIT: never mind, i get it now.

You said "I might want to say...", and he snarked back that "you'd better decide whether you want to or not".

It was just a piece of snark that adds nothing to the conversation, but it makes perfect sense nonetheless.

[Chagen]

All right.

Okay, so he was making some kind of asshole statement on my use of "I might want to say". I assumed it was a non sequitur because I say "I might want to..." so often I quite literally don't even REMEMBER that I wrote it. I hate making direct statements especially when I was telling the guy "hey, your site isn't working". I didn't want to be blunt. It's how I write. I did not literally mean "I may or may not want to say [STATEMENT]". I just tend to add "I might want to..." as a meaningless filler that makes me statement less blunt. I thought what he said was a non sequitur because I had quite literally forgotten that I had written that and when I had re-read it my mind just skipped over the "I might want to say" part because it's that meaningless.

Of course, Drydic had to be a twit about it. I don't like being blunt, fuck.

Pinetree: I think he was referring to my statement of "might", not that.

[cromulant]

Pinetree doesn't get it either.

Pinetree gets it now.

[Pinetree]

[quote="cromulant"]Pinetree doesn't get it either.[/quote]
I do, but editing my post took too long.

[Chagen]

No matter what anyone says this is ALL Drydic's fault for being a snarky twit.

[Yng]

No matter what anyone says this is ALL Drydic's fault for being a snarky twit.

do you really say 'twit' in real life?!

and really if you're going to phrase things so awkwardly with weird space-fillers like 'I might' which are not in general usage in that sense on this of all boards you should probably get used to snark, you've been here too long for it to be new, upsetting, or even noteworthy

[kuroda]

Um, can we get back to serious business, like the level of SRYSLYNSS appropriate to a given scope of a priori conlanging? I really don't give a crap about "Drydic", who -- OH YES AD HOMINEM -- does admittedly come across like living totally up to his name, dea gratia, but this is the intarwebz: the dics are a given, let's just move on by and not just turn into a bunch of jerkass Monty-Python-quoting-type-of-nerds scoring points off each other in some masturbatory chumstorm.

FWIW, and in a totally non-distractingly trollish way, I urge all young and pure conlangers to avoid meddling with PIE. It leads -- inexorably, unthinkably, squamously and rugosely -- to elves and dwarves or dwarfs and even more dull and repugnant lines of discourse. You might as well get involved in auxlanging, amiright?

Kim

[ObsequiousNewt]

FWIW, and in a totally non-distractingly trollish way, I urge all young and pure conlangers to avoid meddling with PIE. It leads -- inexorably, unthinkably, squamously and rugosely -- to elves and dwarves or dwarfs and even more dull and repugnant lines of discourse. You might as well get involved in auxlanging, amiright?

But... but I like ablaut!

[Salmoneus]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

[WeepingElf]

FWIW, and in a totally non-distractingly trollish way, I urge all young and pure conlangers to avoid meddling with PIE. It leads -- inexorably, unthinkably, squamously and rugosely -- to elves and dwarves or dwarfs and even more dull and repugnant lines of discourse. You might as well get involved in auxlanging, amiright?

WHAT?

I don't see how "meddling with PIE" leads to "elves and dwarves or dwarfs and even more dull and repugnant lines of discourse". What I see is that pielangs are weighed down by similar problems as romlangs, though to a lesser degree. You have to find a middle way between plausible but more of the same and interesting but implausible. If you look at the IE languages of antiquity, they are typologically all pretty much the same; and many PIE-descended conlangs are like them, too. The last 2,000 years have seen some divergence from this "classical IE model", though, with two large areas - the SAE area and the South Asian one - but also with a few interesting "misfits": Insular Celtic, Armenian, Tocharian.

What these "misfits" show: One can do some interesting stuff in IE without falling into a bottomless pit of implausibility. One of my minor projects is a language that goes by the working title Valkosunyka, an IE language in the Sayan mountains, somewhat akin to Tocharian, that has preserved the laryngeals, changed the voiced aspirated stops into voiced fricatives (or retained them that way; it is IMHO not implausible that they actually were voiced fricatives in PIE), developed vowel harmony and shifted to an agglutinating morphology similar to the neighbouring Uralic and Turkic languages.

What regards "elves and dwarves": my Elvish (Albic) languages are meant to be related to IE, but not descendants of PIE proper; my Dwarvish (Razaric) languages are utterly unrelated.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

I would have gone with "analyzing every instance of /a/ as /eh₂/", which is something I eh₂ctueh₂lly deh₃.

[Particles the Greek]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

I would have gone with "analyzing every instance of /a/ as /eh₂/", which is something I eh₂ctueh₂lly deh₃.

Ah, but how can you be sure that what seems to be /e/ isn't actually /eh₁/?

[KathTheDragon]

Or /eh₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁h₁.../ (Yeah, I know)

[Salmoneus]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

I would have gone with "analyzing every instance of /a/ as /eh₂/", which is something I eh₂ctueh₂lly deh₃.

Ah, but how can you be sure that what seems to be /e/ isn't actually /eh₁/?

Because that would give a long vowel. Presumably you mean /h₁e/?

Welf: yeah, I've been thinking about a Tocharian or pseudo-Tocharian. There's a lot of scope there. But perhaps too much scope - they completely reworked the vowel system, collapsed all the consonants together (and then split them out again with palatalisation), got rid of most of the morphology and then made up their own, etc. Kind of feels like that gives us TOO much leeway!

[Particles the Greek]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

I would have gone with "analyzing every instance of /a/ as /eh₂/", which is something I eh₂ctueh₂lly deh₃.

Ah, but how can you be sure that what seems to be /e/ isn't actually /eh₁/?

Because that would give a long vowel. Presumably you mean /h₁e/?

Yes, but the post I replied to was wrong, too, so I merely perpetuated the inaccuracy.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Sure sign you need to stop looking at PIE - when you start trying to put random English nouns into the zero-grade when oblique.

[This isn't meant to start a terribly unfunny 'ten ways to know' chain, this is just an example from real life]

I would have gone with "analyzing every instance of /a/ as /eh₂/", which is something I eh₂ctueh₂lly deh₃.

Ah, but how can you be sure that what seems to be /e/ isn't actually /eh₁/?

Eh?

Yes, but the post I replied to was wrong, too, so I merely perpetuated the inaccuracy.

Yes, well, English doesn't have /ā/. Pretend I said /h₂e/ instead if it makes you feel better.

[Drydic]

Um, can we get back to serious business, like the level of SRYSLYNSS appropriate to a given scope of a priori conlanging? I really don't give a crap about "Drydic", who -- OH YES AD HOMINEM -- does admittedly come across like living totally up to his name, dea gratia, but this is the intarwebz: the dics are a given, let's just move on by and not just turn into a bunch of jerkass Monty-Python-quoting-type-of-nerds scoring points off each other in some masturbatory chumstorm.

Name's gone. We'll see if I can reverse this persona I seemingly have acquired.

[cromulant]

I really don't give a crap about "Drydic", who -- OH YES AD HOMINEM -- does admittedly come across like living totally up to his name, dea gratia, but this is the intarwebz: the dics are a given,

Drydic wasn't being a dick (nor is he one), he was being mildly snarky--and witty--and really *not* mean or personally insulting at all, and Chagen exploded into his usual blind foaming-mouthed, insult-flinging rage, instead of brushing it off like the harmless comment it was, or even laughing with it. And then he has the gall to blame it on Drydic?

Sorry to reopen these still-healing wounds, I know it's a distraction from "Naturalistic conlang from a proto-language: How rigorous?" but your comment pisses me off.

Name's gone. We'll see if I can reverse this persona I seemingly have acquired.

Don't change. No need.

[Drydic]

Name's gone. We'll see if I can reverse this persona I seemingly have acquired.

Don't change. No need.

This was far from the only reason for the name change, just the straw that broke the camel's back.

[WeepingElf]

Can't we drop the matter with Drydic (all of which started with a remark on a failing web site) and get back to the TOPIC?

What we have found out so far seems to be:

1. The better the natlang you use as a starting point for an a posteriori diachronic conlang is known, the more rigour is necessary in your conlang in order to avoid problems being pointed out by those who know that natlang well.

2. Some natlangs, such as PIE and Latin, have been used so often that it is not easy to do something that is both original (i.e., different from both the existing natlangs and the conlangs done before in a significant way) and plausible.

What I can add to this is the following:

3. Whenever doing an a posteriori diachronic conlang, you should know the starting language as well as you can. Otherwise, you will make mistakes.

[Salmoneus]

I'm really not sure PIE's been done to death. Lots of people dabble, sure, but how many really fleshed-out IElangs are there? And given the variety between the extant daughters, it seems strange to think there's not scope for something new.

[Drydic]

No, it hasn't been done to death. But the scale needed to do it well is quite intimidating to those who realize it.

[WeepingElf]

No, it hasn't been done to death. But the scale needed to do it well is quite intimidating to those who realize it.

Fair.

1. There are not as many PIE-based conlangs yet as there are Romance, Germanic or Slavic ones. So there is still pretty much to do.

2. The diversity of IE languages is considerably higher than that of any of its branches. That is of course a truism, but it means that there is much more space for individual creativity than in any single branch. PIE is simply more than twice as far in the past as Latin, Common Germanic or Common Slavic; a lot of things can happen in the time elapsed since PIE broke up. The cases of Insular Celtic, Armenian and Tocharian show that a branch of IE can veer off in a direction that looks quite unusual compared to the developments in the major branches; so an unusual-looking PIE-based conlang can be quite plausible.

3. As has been observed before, PIE is not as well-known as, for instance, Latin. For example, nobody really knows what the laryngeals really were; all we can say about them is that they probably were fricatives or approximants in the velar-to-glottal region. That still leaves a lot of possibilities.

This means that PIE-based conlanging has a lot of interesting possibilities to offer. It is far from being done to death!