Hallo conlangers!

(I am posting this to both CONLANG and lostlangs; my apologies to those
who get this twice.)

What started as a language of modern-day Tolkienian Elves back in 2000
(with Nur-ellen, that not-so-well-done descendant of Sindarin) has grown
a lot in the meantime (and has no longer anything to do with Tolkien).
Nur-ellen became Albic, which became a branch of a larger family called
Hesperic. And there is even more to it than that. Now, I have no less
than *four* interlocking lostlang families, Hesperic, Razaric, Eteonoric
and Tommian. Maybe I shall invoke even more! (And then there are the
contributions of other LLL members - but is the League still alive at all?)

Hesperic is a Late Neolithic offshoot of PIE before the rise of ablaut.
Razaric is a language family of the Pre-Hesperic British Isles, spoken
by the "Dwarves" of those islands. Eteonoric, a collaborative effort of
the LLL, is spoken in the eastern Alps, but as some loanwords in
Hesperic (will) show, related languages were once more widely spoken in
Mesolithic Central Europe. Tommian is the language of the
Linearbandkeramik people, the first Neolithic farmers of Central Europe.

See the following FrathWiki articles for their protolanguages (mostly
woefully incomplete and preliminary):

http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Hesperic
http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Razaric
http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Eteonoric
http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Tommian

I now call this the "Grand European Lostlangs Project" (GELP). The whole
thing is based on the grand scheme of hypothetical Paleo-European
languages I posted on September 6:

https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1709A&L=CONLANG&P=R7734&I=-3&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches

How do the lostlang families relate to the hypothetical entities named
in that article? Hesperic is Aquan. Razaric is a Paleo-Atlantic group.
Tommian is Danubian. I am not yet sure about Eteonoric, it sits where
Paleo-Atlantic and Paleo-Pontic meet. The phonology (see
http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Eteonoric) looks quite Paleo-Pontic (if
NW and NE Caucasian belong there); it is either a Paleo-Pontic language
or (perhaps less likely) a Paleo-Atlantic language influenced by
Paleo-Pontic. In the latter case, it should show some resemblance to
Razaric in its morphology (the current sketch of Proto-Razaric at
FrathWiki does not, but I could change that).

These language families of course interact with each other - and with
the natlang families of Europe! Hesperic is a sister of Indo-European. A
large part of the Hesperic vocabulary is based on words with limited
distribution within the western IE language families (see my Lexember
posts this year). There are a few items in Hesperic which seem "wrong"
in combining voiced and aspirated stops in the same root, which should
not exist in my model, yet occur in the loanword list I am compiling,
such as *khabra 'oats'.

What is going on here? Well, they could be loanwords *within* Hesperic,
and I decided that their source is Tommian, which (inspired by genetic
similarities between LBK and Georgians) is related to Kartvelian, though
at a great time depth (almost as deep as Indo-Uralic, if that's a thing,
would be). (Kartvelian does not show the root structure constraints
found in IE and Hesperic which rule out forms like *khabra.)

But even Tommian has loanwords, from an even earlier language family!
This includes all Proto-Tommian words with the vowel *o (my model of the
Tommian-Kartvelian relationship "predicts" that Proto-Tommian had only
/a e i u/ and no /o/), including the self-designation *tommi. And this
is the point where Eteonoric comes into play. Eteonoric is in my scheme
a remnant of a Mesolithic Central European language, and *tommi is in
origin a Para-Eteonoric nickname for the newcomers, from a root *tom-
(or similar) meaning 'to dig'. Keep in mind that the Proto-Tommians were
farmers, and the Para-Eteonoric speakers were hunters and gatherers, and
the latter called the former the "diggers".

So a big bugger of interlocking families, which could keep me occupied
for years. And I have other things to wrap my mind around as well, so ...

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1