Hallo!

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:52:41 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

> <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
> > � wrote:
> 
> Jörg
> 
> >> Hallo!
> >>
> >> On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:40:13 -0400, <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
> >>
> >>> I'm not sure what you mean by "dead" languages.  None of mine have 
> >>> really come to life yet.  Most aren't even complete enough to be used.
> >>
> >> He referred to abandoned projects, I think.  Most of us probably
> >> have a couple of abandoned conlangs.
> 
> I think he probably was.
> 
> > I don't know if I'd consider any of mine abandoned as such.  Maybe just 
> > "dormant".  Just because I'm not working on them doesn't mean I won't 
> > someday pick up where I left off. 
> 
> If something is dormant then it still has some residue of 
> life in it.

Yep.

>       But the very many projects of my teenage years  
> are truly dead. All records of most have long since 
> disappeared and there's no way I could breath life back into 
> them, even if I wished to.

While it has been said that one should never say "never", some
of my old projects are indeed dead - most of the notes have been
lost, and I have no intention to revive them.  This definitely
holds for two conlangs I made for a space-opera universe featuring
a high-tech Atlantis and surviving interstellar colonies thereof;
one of the languages was meant to be a descendant of the other,
meant to be spoken 12,000 years(!) later - nevertheless, it was
still recognizably similar, about as close as English to German,
and I had not yet caught the notion of regular sound changes, so
the words were similar in a haphazard way.  Also, their grammars
worked almost exactly like German (both languages worked exactly
the same - only the forms of the morphemes were different), and
there were no well-defined phonologies to start with.  To sum up,
it was hackwork from the standpoint of the more mature conlanger
I am now, and the universe was waaaaaaaaaaay too corny to continue.
Also, as I have said, most of the notes are lost.

Some other projects of mine which haven't received attention lately,
in contrast, are just dormant; I keep the notes I have made so far,
and I may pick them up again later.

> A year or so back, when going through some old stuff I did 
> come across a sketch of something called 'Voldapeko' from 
> January of 1953. As it happened it did include numbers from 
> 1 to 10 (and a few others) so I let Janko know them.
> 
> But this is a language which is surely dead! I have stumbled 
> across some remains of the corpse. But what I have found is 
> so ghastly I wouldn't want to try to revive it nor, to be 
> honest, do I see anything there worth recycling (Why, even 
> its name is ghastly!). I just put it down to the folly of 
> youth   ;)

Ah, juvenile auxlangs - I also had one which, however, never got
far.  If I remember correctly, it was based on Latin words and a
simple, perfectly regular grammar with Novial-like gender markers.

Sometimes an old project, even if one has no intention to continue,
may be useful as a quarry of ideas.  This is the case with Nur-ellen,
the Sindarin-descended language I made up nine years ago.  I now
consider it largely a mistake - I had managed to reduce the beauty
of Sindarin to mincemeat, and I feel that doing one's own thing is
better than deriving from others - and it has been superseded by what
is now known as Albic, but the Albic system of marking degrees of
volition is indeed recycled from Nur-ellen (the principle, that is,
not the actual case forms); it was the main strong point of Nur-ellen,
and indeed *my* idea rather than Tolkien's).  Actually, even the
space-opera conlangs I mentioned above lended an idea to Old Albic:
they were my first conlangs wherein I experimented with
suffixaufnahme.  And even the juvenile auxlang turned out to have
something I could salvage for Albic, namely the gender marking
(though Albic inherited only the principle, in a refined from,
not the concrte forms).

But nevertheless, but the Atlantean space-opera languages and the
juvenile auxlang are dead.  The notes are mostly lost, and I don't
intend to revive them.

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