Hallo conlangers!

On Monday 18 February 2013 14:58:54 R A Brown wrote:

> [...]
> On 18/02/2013 04:47, James Kane wrote:
> > I know those languages as bogolangs.
> 
> So do I.
> 
> I think, however, there is a useful difference between
> altlang & bogolang.  I would use altlang to denote a
> language that might _plausibly_ have developed in an
> alternative history.

Correct.
 
> I would classify Jörg's "Old Albanic" as an altlang.

Yes.  The "what-if" assumption in Old Albic (not "Albanic") is
"What if we knew what language was spoken in the British Isles
before those lands became Celtic-speaking?".  Otherwise, the
world in which Old Albic is spoken is like ours.  Of course,
we cannot know whether the languages spoken in pre-Celtic
Britain were anything like Old Albic or not.  Probably, those
languages have very little to do with Old Albic, even though
I have worked some faint clues we *do* have on them into my
conlang.

And of course, Old Albic is not at all a bogolang.

> Two or three years ago I wrote a short story for a creative
> writing group I belong which was set in a modern Britain
> where Harold Godwinson had defeated William of Normandy in
> 1066, thus preserving English from the flood of Norman
> French borrowings etc.  I did include one or two examples of
> the alternate modern English, but never worked the language
> out in detail.  But if I had worked out the language more
> fully, that would have been an altlang.  It certainly would
> not have been a bogolang.

Certainly not!
 
> My understanding is that Brithenig did start out as an
> altlang: What would modern British Romance be like if spoken
> Latin had survived the withdrawal of the legions?  But IMO
> it did lean too far in the bogolang direction.  It certainly
> gives that appearance.

Yes.  Brithenig is not really a bogolang, but it gets close, and
is guilty of treading loose a wave of bogolangs.
 
> But things like Breathanach, Þrjótrunn and Wenedyk do seem
> to me genuine bogolangs.

Right.  They are not only made by grafting some other language's
sound changes on Latin, but are also meant to be spoken in areas
outside the Roman Empire at its largest extent.

My own Roman Germanech is a near-bogolang, being based on slightly
modified sound changes of German applied to Vulgar Latin.  I must
confess that it is not really a good conlang.  Indeed, I have no
plans with it other than writing up a grammar sketch with a few
text samples and a small vocabulary, putting it on my web site
- and leaving it at that.  Good riddance!  It is not particularly
plausible, neither as a language from an alternative history
where Varus defeated Arminius (the original scenario), nor as a
lostlang set in the Odenwald (the current scenario).

> > I think it depends on how closely you want your language
> > 
> >  to resemble your target language. T
> 
> Indeed - and also whether it is a genuine altlang, i.e. the
> way a language might plausibly have developed if history had
> been different, or whether it is a bogolang, i.e. early
> Germanic with the sound changes of a Slavonic group.

Yes.  That is a difference.  Of course, we cannot say that a
bogolang was *impossible* - it is just very unlikely, and also
not a particularly interesting thing to do.
 
> The usual way of developing a bogolang AIUI is to take an
> early form of a language, e.g. Vulgar Latin, Norse, Old
> English, Old High German etc and apply the sound changes of
> a different language group over a similar period of time.

Yes, that is the definition of "bogolang".
 
> [snip]
> 
> > Personally I would perform sound changes to get between
> > two languages with similar morphology i.e.
> > proto-Germanic and proto-Slavic and then perform the
> > relevant East Slavic sound changes.
> 
> It would certainly produce a bogolang. Personally, I don't
> find these very interesting, except as an odd curiosity.

Amen!  This usually does not yield particularly interesting
results, and applying sound changes of language A to language B
does not work well.  I have tried with Roman Germanech, I do not
wish to try again!

> More interesting IMO is to try to imagine what might have
> developed if, through some chance of history, the language
> situation in some particular area had been different from
> what it is.

Yes, and the best way of exploring this is not assuming that the
same sound changes that happened *here* happened *there* as well,
only to a different language!  Sound changes are always responses
on the developmental possibilities the phonology of a particular
language offers, and once you replace that language by another
language with a different phonology (and no two languages have
the same phonology), those possibilities are changed, and thus
also the responses.
 
> Every so often I think if I ever the time, I might try to
> produce what I think a modern British Romancelang would be
> like; or I might revive the alternate TAKE world again - tho
> the fear of it going the way of Ill Bethisad really puts me
> off - and envisaging, say, the modern Hellenic of Gaul.

But not by applying the sound changes of French to Koine Greek ;)

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