Trilingual altlang scenarios

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Porphyrogenitos
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Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

The other day I was browsing Raymond Ignatius' "proposed British Romance language," or Britainese. What makes his project interesting is that it takes a different approach to diachronic conlanging than "bogolangs," which apply the sound changes of one language to another language, often after "forcing" the phonology of the other language into the initial form of the language providing the sound changes. The results of bogolangs are fun and often aesthetically pleasing, but are often a bit whimsical and rather implausible in that another language would slavishly imitate the phonological and grammatical developments of another language (yes, it happens, but it's not always the most likely outcome.)

Anyways, what Ignatius does is consider the changes that happened in French/Norman, Welsh, and English when deciding on the development of Britainese. He assumes the changes that apply throughout northernmost Gallo-Romance will happen in Britainese, at least in the early stages. After that, most of his changes are selected based on developments in Welsh and English - if it happened in both Welsh and English, then it also happens in Britainese, under the assumption that it's an areal phenomenon that would also affect the Romance-speaking population. (His history also assumes that both Anglo-Saxon and Welsh also ultimately go extinct, as well.)

The result is a realistic and highly distinctive Romance language, though one that's a bit conservative and doesn't go hog-wild with exuberant imported phonological and grammatical changes like initial consonant mutation. This is possible because there are not just one but two "source" languages against which to "check" the development of Britainese. Britainese is the product of the overlap of three different sub-branches of Indo-European - Romance, Celtic, and Germanic.

Are there any other situations (geographically and historically) where we could apply this more rigorous alternative to the "bogolang" technique? Crucially, it depends heavily on there being extensive documentation/reconstruction of the internal history of each language family involved.

I suppose the Balkans would be one area, since we know plenty about the history of Greek, Slavic, and Romanian, and have a pretty good picture about Albanian. I had an idea about a Greek-inspired Gothic bogolang a while ago - I suppose I could try to do that, but "check" its development against both Greek and Slavic/Bulgarian, assuming some Goths remained behind in the Balkans (since they were in the area around the 300s/400s AD).
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Creyeditor
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Re: Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by Creyeditor »

How about a Romlang in South-Eastern Germany, which could be an extension of Romansh checked against Slavic neighbouring languages and Germanic neighbouring languages?
(Of course you could also do a Slavic language in the Western Alps or a Germanic language close to Romania)
Or maybe a Slavic language in Northern Germany checked against Low German and Danish? (Both of the checks are Germanic, but maybe they are distinct enough?)
And of course Austronesian languages in Penninsular South-East Asia, checked against e.g. Vietnamese and Thai.
A Khoe-Kwadi language in East Africa checked against Swahili and Somali?
A Kwa-language in Southern Africa checked against Nguni and Nama?
I think there are lots and lots of possibilities, depending on the historic documentation of course.
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WeepingElf
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Re: Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by WeepingElf »

Indeed, Britainese advances Romance conlanging to a whole new level. What Raymond A. Brown (as I know him) does is much more realistic and sophisticated than the "bogolang" approach found in languages like Andrew Smith's Brithenig and other Ill Bethisad romlangs (and my own Germanech, which was originally intended for Ill Bethisad but never used there). Also, it has inspired me to try it myself, in a project with the provisional name "Black Forest Romance" (which sounds awfully like a 1950s German Heimatfilm,so I'll give it another name as soon as I know which one), which would be intermediate between Lorrain French and Raeto-Romance. However, this project is of low priority, as I have enough to do with Old Albic; also, good sources for Lorrain are hard to find.
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Shemtov
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Re: Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by Shemtov »

Creyeditor wrote: 14 Jan 2022 08:10
And of course Austronesian languages in Penninsular South-East Asia, checked against e.g. Vietnamese and Thai.
ANADEW, Some Chamic languages like Tsat and Phan Rang Cham, are already influenced by Vietnamese, having undergone tonogenesis, in addition to the very common Austronesian disyllabic roots turning monosyllabic in colloquial speech. .
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Re: Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by Salmoneus »

Personally, I think this is the least convincing part of BART - the assumption that magical "areal effects" will operate exactly the same even with different languages in the area, or with the languages in the area having distinctly different histories, standings, etc. In reality, areal affects are just mutual influences between the languages that are there, depending on their own natures and their relative infuence over one another; if you add an entirely different language, or remove a language, or alter the relative position of the languages, then the "areal effects" will not turn out the same. In the case of BART, the British sprachbund in OT is a result of the internal developments of English over the centuries, with some substrate influence from Brythonic; in BART's timeline, there is no internal development of English because Old English goes extinct almost immediately, with presumably no more influence than a bunch of loanwords, and the Brythonic substrate is very different, because it will go extinct much earlier (as almost the whole Brythonic heartland is already speaking Latin as a second language the whole time, rather than being a completely alien race beyond the borders as the Welsh were for the English). So OT's British sprachbund shouldn't be seen as a particularly good guide to the linguistic situation of Romance Britain. [and, in the opposite direction, the influence from Norman and Latin will be very different, because they'll be introduced as nearly-intelligible to the general public rather than a wholly different language; meanwhile, Norse will NOT be nearly-intelligible and hence won't have anything like the same influence as in OT. Given that that era of Anglo-Norse bilingual contact was probably a key element in the 'levelling down' of English grammatical forms, that'll presumably have a considerable effect...]

That's not to criticise the BART project, mind you. I certainly agree with paying close attention to the internal history of the language and its closest relatives, and to with NOT simply copy-pasting changes from another language onto it. And there's nothing wrong in seeking inspiration from OT languages of the area. In general, I like the way BART goes about proposing a more grounded Romlang. I just don't think that we should leap on this sort of triangulation method as an actually robust way of devising realistic a posteriori languages when such dramatic changes to the linguistic environment are being assumed.

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That said, there's no shortage of appropriate triangulation points: you just need to find a bilingual interface and stick your own language there. Some contact zones that spring to mind in and around Europe:

- in the Maghreb, Arabic and Berber are in a sprachbund (most famously including the MASSIVE syncope of unstressed vowels and resulting insane consonant clusters). And these are areas that were historically Romance-speaking, with Romance next door. Alternatively, these areas have also been home to Germanic and Phoenician languages, and could easily be made home to Iranian (Sarmatian, from next door in Baetica) or Greek (or, more of a stretch, Songhai or Mandinke).

- northern Spain is home to Basque and Romance; but historically there were also Germans and Celts nearby.

- there's a Romance-Germanic contact zone from Belgium all the way to Austria, and all of this area was once Celtic-speaking.

- Illyria and Pannonia are an area of contact between Romance (both Western and Eastern), Slavic (both West and South), and Hungarian. Historically it's also been home to, or at least within reach of, Celtic, Germanic (both East (Gepid) and West (Saxon)), Greek, Albanian, Iranian (Sarmatian), and Turkic (Bulgur, Hun, and later Cuman etc), and even Mongolian, not to mention Dacian.

- Anatolia has been a contact zone for Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Iranian, Armenian, Georgian, Celtic, East Germanic, Slavic, and historically also Akkadian and Aramaic, Hurian, Anatolian, Phrygian, etc.

- The Baltic has been home to Finnic, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic, and could easily enough also be made home to Turkic, Iranian, Mongolic, etc.

- The Crimea has been home to Greek, Iranian (both Scyth-Sarmatian AND Persian), Slavic, Turkic (including Bulgur, Hun, Cuman and Ottoman), Mongolic, Romance, and Germanic (both Gothic and Swabian)...

etc.
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Re: Trilingual altlang scenarios

Post by Zythros Jubi »

Maybe you can imagine what would a Eastern Romlang spoken in Moravia (Moravian Wallachia), Slovakia (Eastern part) or Dalmatia (Morlachia) sound like. There are plenty of evidence in placenames, as well as vocab related to animal husbandry.
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