Hallo conlangers (and lostlangers in particular)!

On 15/07/2017 15:48 C. Brickner wrote:

> It is inspiring to me to see such excitement about your conlangs! I know it will take time, but good luck and thanks for sharing.

Thank you for your good wishes. As I said on Saturday, this project will
not bear fruit soon. But I have some ideas already. "Hercynian" will be
the name of the Hesperic branch, while for the Para-Kartvelian language
(only one so far, though I may add further languages later), I will use
the name "Kreluri".

That name, BTW, has a rather long history, and probably descends from
_Klingon_, or rather its German plural form _Klingonen_. It started as
_Kreloren_, a name coined by a cousin of mine for an alien warrior race
in a space-opera setting he and I were playing with in the 1980s. Back
then, he used to obtain names for fictional races, cultures etc. by
garbling names of similar entities from the real world or published
fiction, so I assume that _Kreloren_ is garbled _Klingonen_.

Later, I changed the name to _Kreluri_ (because I felt that it sounded
better that way), and reused it in several further short-lived settings;
along the way, the Kreluri mutated from an alien warrior race to
descendants of humans that had been moved to another planet by an alien
race many thousand years ago for unknown reasons, in a universe that
featured many such races.

When I abandoned that setting, the name became vacant; as I was thinking
about a name for my Para-Kartvelian language, I found that this name had
a Kartvelian ring to it, especially regarding the fact that Georgian
uses the suffix -uri/-uli for language names. So an alien warrior race
has mutated into a (not particularly warlike) linguistic minority in the
middle of Germany!

Now, working with Kartvelian has its difficulties. I haven't yet found a
grammar sketch of Proto-Kartvelian morphology, though Wikipedia has a
synopsis of the morphologies of the modern Kartvelian languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartvelian_languages#Comparative_grammar

It seems that while the grammatical structures of the four Kartvelian
languages are similar, only a rather small part of the morphemes are
actually cognate. In the nominal declension, only the genitive and
dative suffixes are obviously cognate, while all other case suffixes
(including the ergative!) and the plural markers are not. In the verb,
the personal affixes and the version vowels are clearly cognate, but not
much more.

This led me to the idea of a "stripped down" Kartvelian language with
just three cases (nom., gen., dat.) and two tenses (or "screeves")
(present, past), yet with a typically Kartvelian morphosyntactic
alignment in which the dative functions as accusative in the present
tense (as in Kartvelian proper), and the genitive as ergative in the
past tense. But I'll see.

And by the way, as I was thinking about the back story of Kreluri (which
I will set in southern Thuringia, which despite its central location in
Germany was quite isolated between the Iron Curtain and the Thüringer
Wald mountain range in the critical time between 1950 and 1990 when many
"secret languages" died out in Europe), it occured to me (once again)
that some of all those "secret languages" of showmen, shepherd,
charcoal-burners and other marginalized social groups may be residues of
older linguistic layers. Most of these languages have recently gone
extinct, so no field work is possible anymore, and all that is
documented of them (if anything) are a few words, and nothing is known
about their grammars. Perhaps, linguists are systematically
underestimating the linguistic diversity of Early Modern Europe! I am
already using Shelta words in Old Albic; perhaps some Rotwelsch words
will be of Hercynian or Kreluri origin.

But as I said on Saturday, all this has to wait until I have got the
Hesperic lexicon better developed; I am currently going through Guus
Kroonen's Germanic etymological dictionary, searching it for items
without good IE etymologies that Germanic may have borrowed from
substratum languages. Yet, it's a nice digression whenever I feel tired
of my work with the Germanic dictionary ;)

--
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