Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 15 September 2011 11:01:11, Daniel Prohaska wrote:

> I was asked what “re-conlangs” are. It’s short for “reconstructed
> languages”.

Yes.  That way, reconstructed ancestor languages such as Proto-
Indo-European are often called "re-conlangs" - they are in fact
conlangs which *model* a lost linguistic reality of a distant
past: a model which tells something about the real thing, but
not the real thing itself.  The fact that many details are still
contentious about Proto-Indo-European shows that it is indeed
just a model and nothing else.

>        I’m very interested in as well as allow myself to be inspired
> by so-called “Trümmersprachen”, ‘language fragments’, poorly attested
> languages that have at one point or another in time existed in the real
> world. I am involved in the Cornish language revival and compared to the
> many poorly attested languages e have, Cornish has a literature and is
> retrievable, but two of my pet projects are ‘Vegliot’ the Dalmatian
> dialect of Krk, the last remnant of Dalmatian Romance which became extinct
> in the course of the 19th century. I was also working on Norn, the
> Scandinavian language of Orney and Shetland for a while, but I saw
> somebody else doing the job, and a fine one at that. Crimean Gothic was
> also an inspiration and I’m sure there are plenty more one could fall in
> love with. Dan

I am doing something similar, but much more speculative, with
Old Albic: I re-create a lost language of the British Isles,
spoken there before the Celtic languages were established in
the area.  I call this a "re-creation" rather than a
"reconstruction" because there is so little known about the
target language that I pretty much have to make up the whole
language, weaving in the little bits of evidence we have, and
what I create probably has very little to do with what was
actually spoken there in the distant past.

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