Hallo!

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:01:33 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > Hi!
> [...]
> 
> > Yeah.  My goal of a plausibly Romance diachronical fauxlang that I
> > like is a bit hard to explain. :-)

The problem I see with Terkunan is that it tries to be two things
at once: a diachronic Romance language, *and* a fauxlang with an
isolating grammar.  You cannot have both at once, I think, and end
up with something which is neither.

> > I'll try:
> > 
> > Defining exactly how Terkunan developed historically is not my primary
> > goal, it just came in handy that I had an alternate universe so I
> > placed Terkunan there.  
> 
> Yes, putting TAKE in the WHAT timeline suited my purpose. But *there* it 
> is an auxlang consciously fashioned by one Josephos Peanou. There is no 
> diachronic development. It is not an auxlang fashioned from whatever 
> Hellenic languages developed diachronically in WHAT from ancient Greek. 
> It is fashioned by JP directly from ancient Greek.

Exactly.

> > The diachronical development is retro-fitted and secondary.
> 
> That would seem to me to be making life difficult   :)

AMEN.  What I see what Henrik is trying to do with Terkunan is
to make a language which has evolved from Vulgar Latin by
naturalistic sound changes, while at the same time appealing
to his taste for perfectly regular, simple engelangs.  And that's
the problem.

> > 
> > Primary design goals are:
> > 
> >    - To have a Grand Master Plan that produces a well-sounding
> >      language (some languages I have in mind are mentioned on the
> >      page).  The GMP guarantees some consistency, which I value
> >      high.  It seems like an improvement over Da Mätz se Basa.
> 
> OK - I have no problem with a GMP.

Nor do I.  I am fiddling around with sound change lists all the time
in my conlanging.

> >    - Vulgar Latin as a basis, so that the result looks plausibly
> >      Romance.  At first and maybe second sight, Terkunan should be a
> >      normal Romance language.  (This goal means that the 4th
> >      declension thing above might indeed be a problem.)
> 
> This is fine if one wants to deign a Romancelang - indeed, one must 
> surely start from Vulgar Latin (tho I guess one could start with the 
> Vulgar Latin of an alternate timeline/universe and not with VL as it was 
> *here*).

Agreed, too.  This, together with a GMP, makes a conlang a Romance
conlang.

> >    - Isolating morphology.  For plausibly sounding verb forms,
> >      I retain a few irregular forms.
> 
> As you can see from TAKE I have no problem with a language having 
> isolating morphology   :)

Nor do I.  But - the "Construction" boxes on Henrik's page reveal
that the sound changes are secondary to a word formation mechanism
which resembles those used by the authors of Latino sine flexione,
IALA Interlingua, or, for that matter, TAKE.  This word formation
mechanism has *nothing* to do with the kind of changes that happen
in natlangs (or true diachronic conlangs), so why, then, all that
mumbo-jumbo about a Grand Master Plan and natural evolution of
the language?  I'm sorry, Henrik, but you are trying to do two
vastly different things at once, and that usually doesn't work
out well.

> > Following these goals, some structures might need some thinking to be
> > retro-fitted to historical development...
> 
> Precisely - that's what I was asking about. The verbs are so radically 
> reduced that I find I cannot make any useful comment without knowing how 
> these reduced forms were supposed to have developed from VL.

Nor can I, except than saying that Henrik is falling between two
stools by trying to create a conlang which tries to be two things
at once which can hardly be reconciled with each other.

I feel that Henrik's strengths lie in engelanging - he has made
quite a few very interesting and original languages - but when it
comes to diachronic naturalistic conlanging, his results are
unfortunately less brilliant.

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