Project Concept

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Project Concept

Post by SandChigger »

OK, the original link for this over on Arrakeen is here:

http://z10.invisionfree.com/Dune_Forum/ ... topic=1625

Here's the important parts:
The Trekkies have Klingon, so why don't we Dunesters create Galach?!

Just kidding (sort of), I'm not really aiming for something that big. But I thought it would be fun to do some speculating.

I started a thread like this elsewhere, but it kinda petered out after a day or so.

How many people here have any experience with "conlangs" (constructed languages) as creators or learners, how many people speak/know Russian or another Slavic language, and how many people would be interested in participating in something like this?
(I'll pop over to Dune Novels now to see if anything is left there.)

Edit: Here is the link for the (one-page only) thread at Dune Novels:

http://www.dunenovels.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1987
GALACH: official language of the Imperium. Hybrid Inglo-Slavic with strong traces of cultural-specialization terms adopted during the long chain of human migrations.

This is just an idea for a fun little (ha!) side project I've been toying around with for a while.

Anyone here a native or fairly fluent speaker of Russian (or another Slavic language)? Anyone else familiar with the language at all?
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Post by Omphalos »

Ragabash minored in Russian, IIRC.
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

-James C. Harwood, Science Fiction Writer, Straight (March 5, 1956 - May 25, 2010)



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Post by SandChigger »

Kewl! :D
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Post by Omphalos »

Now that I think about it, he may have majored in it. Hes got a great story about watching on TV the fall of the Soviet Union just as he was getting ready to graduate. Ragabash's getting ready to take baby steps into that great big world of possibilities, and Yeltsin's drunkenly stumbling to the top of a tank to shake his fist at the Politburo HQ.

And the Award for Perfect Timing goes to........
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

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Post by Liege-Killer »

A few comments to offer, if I may. (Somehow I overlooked this part of the forum until tonight; I must be blind.)

I think this is a very interesting and fun kind of project. But what kind of time interval are we talking about? Isn't it something like 20,000 years? A lot of (maybe most) linguists will say that's more than enough time for language change to totally obscure any resemblance between two periods of a language. Hell, look at how much real languages change in just two or three thousand years (or even less). Of course there are those, such as Ruhlen or Greenberg, who would say there ARE detectable resemblances over very long timescales (and I do admire their work). But still, to do this with any kind of realism would be extremely difficult. That doesn't mean it's not worth the attempt though. It's a cool idea. :D

Question for you. I saw in one of the other threads you mentioned pidgins and creoles. Is there a reason you think Galach should have originated with that process? That doesn't seem necessary to me, or even very likely. I think FH simply used the languages of the two world superpowers when he was writing, with the idea that those two languages would have widespread influence for some time to come, and eventually you'd end up with one of them becoming the winner as "the" human language, but with heavy influence from the other, particularly in vocabulary. At least that's how I see it going down. Think of something like Britain after the Norman invasion: Middle English = Old English + massive infusion of French vocabulary.
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Post by SandChigger »

Hi, L-K!

I'm hoping to get back into this full scale starting in March (ginfers crossed! ;) ), once we're officially into spring break at the uni, so stay tuned!

I don't think I've reposted it here, but I remember addressing the time scale issue elsewhere (DN?). 25,000 years is WAY longer than anything we know about, so yeah, the realism is going to be a problem.

As for the pidgin/creole aspect, FH describes the language as "Hybrid Inglo-Slavic with strong traces of cultural-specialization terms adopted during the long chain of human migrations." The assumption inherent in that is that the United States/Western Europe and Russia/former Eastern bloc become the major forces in (initial?) Sol(ar)Sys(tem) colonization. To achieve that in my version of Duniverse history, I assume that China undergoes some sort of social collapse that knocks them out of the space race long enough for the other two to attain a dominant foothold.

As you no doubt are aware, pidgins often arise whenever speakers of different languages are thrown together, creoles when children grow up in a pidgin environment. (Or so the theory goes.) Since I figure that, initially, more Russians will be more familiar with English than the opposite, and English grammar is "simpler" than Russian (at least the morphology is!), the initial language will be closer to English than not. (The fact that I'm a native English speaker with a limited knowledge of Russian is also a factor, of course.)

So English will in effect form the substrate with both languages providing vocabulary.

But that's just my initial plan at the moment. I really want this to develop into a group project, so any and all feedback is more than welcome! :D
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:As you no doubt are aware, pidgins often arise whenever speakers of different languages are thrown together, creoles when children grow up in a pidgin environment. (Or so the theory goes.) Since I figure that, initially, more Russians will be more familiar with English than the opposite, and English grammar is "simpler" than Russian (at least the morphology is!), the initial language will be closer to English than not. (The fact that I'm a native English speaker with a limited knowledge of Russian is also a factor, of course.)
But what you're describing is not a pidgin. All pidgins are hybrids, but not all hybrids are pidgins. A pidgin is something narrower, more specific, that arises in certain kinds of circumstances. It's a stripped-down, makeshift, simplified language created when two groups are forced together and there are no other good options -- no interpreters available, no ready instruction tools for one group to learn the other's language, or no incentive or pressure to do so. In the modern age of communication, when computerized translation is already taking off, I can't see those circumstances arising between the speakers of two dominant languages. The resources are there for each group to learn the other's language if need be, and that's a far preferable solution than a pidgin. Pidgins tend to have very limited vocabularies, as well as a simplistic tense system, and that hardly seems useful to modern peoples who rely so heavily on science and technology.
SandChigger wrote:So English will in effect form the substrate with both languages providing vocabulary.
We're in agreement on that much. I think maybe it's just a matter of terminology. It might be better to call it a mixed language:
A mixed language is a language that arises when speakers of different languages are in contact and show a high degree of bilingualism. Occasionally, more than two languages may be involved.

A mixed language differs from a pidgin in that its speakers developing the language are fluent, even native, speakers of the source languages concerned, whereas a pidgin develops when groups of people with no knowledge of each other's languages come into contact and have need of a basic communication system, e.g. for trade, but do not have enough contact to learn each other's language or to develop a lingua franca.
See also: language merger (mixed language taken to the extreme, it seems to me).
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Post by SandChigger »

Maybe so. I was thinking of it in the context of people having to live and work together in novel environments and not having a lot of time to devote to language learning of a more formal sort.

I realize I've also been overlooking the factor of machine-assisted translation in such contexts. :oops:
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

I'm just trying to throw out some ideas. Hope it helps.
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Post by SandChigger »

Please continue! :D

That's why I hope more people get involved...obviously there are things I'm overlooking!
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by SandChigger »

Had another look at the mixed languages article on WP. These examples could furnish us with some hints on how to start off:
  • Michif, a mixture of French and Cree, where the nouns and adjectives tend to be French (including agreement), and the polysynthetic verbs are entirely Cree. There are two simultaneous gender systems, French masculine/feminine as well as Cree animate/inanimate, and the Cree obviative (fourth person).
  • Mednyj Aleut, a mixture of Russian and Aleut, which retains Aleut verbs but has replaced most of the inflectional endings with their Russian equivalents.
  • Cappadocian Greek, comprising mostly Greek root words, but with many Turkish grammatical endings and Turkish vowel harmony, and no gender.
  • Mbugu or Ma’a: an inherited Cushitic vocabulary with a borrowed Bantu inflectional system.
  • AngloRomani (mixture of Roma vocabulary and English syntax)
  • Media Lengua (mixture of Quechua morphology and Spanish lexicon)
Anything look good?

We've tentatively agreed to split the lexicon/vocabulary between both languages; do we want to set different preferences for different parts of speech (syntactic/lexical categories)? E.g., more nouns from English, verbs from Russian, adjectives 50/50, etc? Or just wing it as we go and tally the ho later? ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:We've tentatively agreed to split the lexicon/vocabulary between both languages; do we want to set different preferences for different parts of speech (syntactic/lexical categories)? E.g., more nouns from English, verbs from Russian, adjectives 50/50, etc? Or just wing it as we go and tally the ho later? ;)
Of course this is all with the very big assumption that in the "galactic age" language change becomes extremely conservative and drastically slows down..... we can't really get anywhere without that assumption if we want to use English and Russian as a base. So, accepting that......

I would say that since English is so much more widespread in the world of today than Russian that it would have a more dominant role. So maybe 75% English, 25% Russian? As to dividing by categories, I'm not sure how to decide. I'm not sure how that comes about in real-world mixed languages. Maybe just split all the categories 75/25? I'll have to read up on Russian and see if there is anything that stands out as distinctive enough that English speakers would also adopt it -- some interesting bit of morphology or something. Hmmm.... the Russian diminutive suffixes come to mind, such as -ka and -shka and the like.

I'm thinking that since English has more cultural dominance today, most basic words should come from it. Russian should contribute a good deal of scientific and technical terms, since that has been a strong point of that nation. Perhaps also some political terms?

We also have this advantage: English and Russian both being Indo-European languages, they share a good number of cognates. For those words, we don't have to worry so much about which side they come from. :D

EDIT: Hey, I just found one possible mechanism by which language change might be slowed down in this case. In a very brief wikipedia article on Galach, someone wrote:

"Galach is the official language of the Imperium and is used in official texts and in the Royal Court on Kaitain. Other languages are used at a local level and many people will only use Galach when they meet a person from another planet."

If it's used mostly on an interplanetary basis, rather than for everyday intraplanetary affairs, that might provide a good deal of insulation from language change. Would it really work out that way? I have no idea, but it sounds good to me.
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Post by SandChigger »

I'm thinking we really only have to worry about English and Russian in developing the "SolSpeak"/Proto-Galach stage. Once we get that set up, we just run with it.

Right now there are six big divisions on the timeline (I've updated it a bit in response to our discussion there, btw). It's probably beyond what we want to get into (??? ;) ) to develop a full language for even one or two of them, so it has occurred to me that we might want to decide which one we really want to focus on (the last? Lanthanian Atreidean?) and take an approach similar to that of Meyers in the DE Galach article, although with a much fuller specification for each stage. Then when we need a word in our target variety, we just work through the etymology from Proto-Galach. (Remember Tolkien's description of how he created the word "hobbit"?) OR we do a mini spec of another language (like the "transite tongue of Perth" or the "Blue Hill speech of the Rima miners" ;) ) and bring in a new word through borrowing.

On the assumption of a "slow down" during the galactic age, I'm just extrapolating from what we've seen over the last 100 years with improved communications and transportation.

The 75/25 ratio sounds good to me. Got dice? (Or other random number generator?) :D

The Russian dimunitive suffixes are a great idea! Add -nik to the list.

Just saw your edit when previewing....

Yeah, I've got that page on my watchlist. ;)

I take that to refer to "Standard Galach". Naturally, Galach is not the only language spoken in the Imperium, but it will be the native language of many of its inhabitants AND serve as a lingua franca when native speakers of other languages meet. (When I first arrived over here and was more in contact with students from around the world, Japanese often served as our mode of communication. And I think I've mentioned before the guy from some Dur-forgotten outback village whose English was so impenetrable that even the other Aussies talked to him in Nihongo. ;) )

But I think you're right, that a standard language is more insulated from change than the daily vernacular. (There's the literacy effect to keep in mind, too. Irulan is going to write in a variety that a majority of her potential readers are going to feel comfortable with. Of course, she would be a native speaker of the prestige dialect to being with.)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

It's probably beyond what we want to get into (??? :wink: ) to develop a full language for even one or two of them, so it has occurred to me that we might want to decide which one we really want to focus on (the last? Lanthanian Atreidean?) and take an approach similar to that of Meyers in the DE Galach article, although with a much fuller specification for each stage.
I definitely think trying to develop a full language for any of those stages, or even a partial language, would be a vastly more complicated and time-consuming project than I, personally, would be willing to embark upon.

As for the rest, I have an idea, but I'm not sure how closely it meshes with what you're thinking.

My eye is drawn to the part about "an approach similar to that of Meyers...... much fuller specification...." Maybe the ultimate goal here should not be creating a language itself, but instead it should be all the background details and history surrounding the language, the sort of things we've been discussing so far. What about creating a piece of fanfic that amounts to a DE entry much fuller and superior to that of Meyers? Not a dry grammar or dictionary of Galach, but an in-depth article that is enriching to read and interesting to Dune fans? Think of how much better the DE article on Fremen language is (lots of history and cultural info) than the one on Galach (stiff and technical). We could write the Galach article that should have been written, rather than Meyers' abbreviated one.

Is that what you had in mind, or anything close to that? What do you think?
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Post by SandChigger »

I had in mind something to rival Klingon! :lol:

I hadn't thought of doing that, but it's a cool idea. I'm in! :D

We'll still have to work up the descriptions for each stage, and I still want to attempt a full specification of the methods for getting from one to another, but, yeah, a DE-style article would probably be of much more interest to people not involved in the nitty-gritty.

Tally ho! :D
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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Post by SandChigger »

About that WP article again....

This text
Galach is the official language of the Imperium and is used in official texts and in the Royal Court on Kaitain. Other langauges are used at a local level and many people will only use Galach when they meet a person from another planet. In this way Galach serves as the Lingua Franca of the Dune Universe.
was added on 24 February 2005 by someone not registered or posting while not logged in. I haven't been able to find a source for it, so it's a bit suss, even though what it says seems reasonable enough.

Not suggesting we throw it out, just pointing this out.
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:About that WP article again....

This text
Galach is the official language of the Imperium and is used in official texts and in the Royal Court on Kaitain. Other langauges are used at a local level and many people will only use Galach when they meet a person from another planet. In this way Galach serves as the Lingua Franca of the Dune Universe.
was added on 24 February 2005 by someone not registered or posting while not logged in. I haven't been able to find a source for it, so it's a bit suss, even though what it says seems reasonable enough.

Not suggesting we throw it out, just pointing this out.
No matter who wrote that text, it almost has to have some truth to it, and it's just too convenient an idea to pass up. We don't have to put much stress on it. But that is one among several factors that we need to slow the rate of change in Galach, if we want it to have ANY recognizable relation to its present-day ancestor(s).
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Post by SandChigger »

On the off chance the DE might be the source, I searched my PDF version and found this, under "Imperial Poetry" (p.339):
CORRINO PERIOD. Galach held an unquestioned supremacy as the language of culture and the arts; it was the official language of the Imperium, and the native tongue of billions of speakers on the settled worlds. Studied as a second language in thousands of schools, it was the language of law and military, and the pathway to political and social advancement.
Again, I agree that the WP quote makes sense and we should incorporate the ideas.

I'm not so sure about that "recognizable relation to its present-day ancestors" part, though. ;)

We're talking about a period of 500 to 1000 years of development here in the solar system, followed by several thousand years of diversification during what I call "The Slow Diaspora". I see a way of maintaining a slower rate of development here, though:

During the initial period, there will be little or no population movement between the far-flung outposts of human space, but presumably they will stay in communication using various normal electromagnetic signals (very slow, even at lightspeed). The languages spoken by the isolated populations will continue to develop on their own, but they will use a(n increasingly) fossilized form of "Solspeak" (Proto-Galach) as a lingua franca for communicating with other colonies.

Whenever faster transportation (and communication) becomes available and people start mingling again, the old lingua franca will serve as their main means of communicating and will again become a vibrant, living language (again, I'm thinking of the Hebrew example somewhat), no doubt revitalized by an influx of new elements from the divergent local languages. That gives us both Galach and a slew of local planetary languages. (When the later are descendants of Proto-Galach to begin with, it will presumably be easier for them to slowly reincorporate elements of the old language. I'm thinking Modern Greek influenced by the Katharevousa mov't here.) I'm still assuming that improved communication & transportation will have the same leveling effect we see in languages today.

But even the above scenario still leaves over 10,000 years to account for. Unless we want to assume a linguistic situation as static as the social one during the duration of the Corrino Empire?
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:I'm not so sure about that "recognizable relation to its present-day ancestors" part, though. :wink:
Well I only say that for the sake of our presumed audience when this is all done. You and I know that we could run a language through 20,000 years of linguistic change and end up with something totally unrecognizable and that would be more realistic and satisfying to us. But it might disappoint many Dune fans who expect to see some resemblance, at least a vague one, to present-day language. Or maybe that shouldn't be a factor at all -- what do you think? If not, then it doesn't really matter how fast or slow Galach changes.
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Post by SandChigger »

Hmm. I haven't really thought about this yet from that PoV. So I will have to do so. ;)

Gut response, at this moment: we're already going to be making concessions in realism with the "roll of the dice" approach to initial lexical item selection, as opposed to trying to predict on logical grounds which people would actually choose and use (a lot of work...and ultimately futile, I'm sure you agree). We'll no doubt adopt a similar approach to deciding on grammatical features, so I'm a little hesitant to sacrifice even more realism by trying to keep the language recognizable in some way.

Maybe we should look at this as a chance to make up for lapses of the past (=the handling of linguistic matters in scifi in general!) and educate the Dune public a little bit about the realities of language change. There's more to it than dropping a few syllables (Rakis from Arrakis), blending (Gammu from Giedi Prime) and sound changes (Odrade from Atreides). ;)

(But I can see the reaction to that, too: Educate us?! AAAAAAH! :D )
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by SandChigger »

A bit more in the way of update...

I've come 'round to the point of view that Meyers wasn't mistaken in his approach in the Galach article in The Dune Encyclopedia (it may be the best we can hope for under the circumstances in practical terms), he just failed to follow through and provide enough detail for each stage of development mentioned.

Most people are only going to be interested, at most, in things like a list of common phrases and expressions or translations of favorite quotes from the books. Some might want a dictionary and grammar for trying their own hand at the latter. Only a very few of us will be interested in (or involved in creating?) the actual nuts (nacnuds?) and bolts of rules and procedures for getting from one stage to another.

What Meyers created for the DE was essentially the last, a series of sound change rules for taking modern English words and converting them into Galach words of various periods; he provided very few actual examples of words and little information on the grammar, or how to use those words. Maybe that's one reason why the language never took off.

Anyway...who's really still interested in this again? ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Re: Project Concept

Post by ᴶᵛᵀᴬ »

Waaaw !!! It's a fabulous project :clap:

My conlang bookmarks (Wikipedia & Amazon mostly) :

Image


Conlang, terminology & conworlding :

Image

Image

Conlang, mythopoeïa & aesthetic of reception :

Image

and this <http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/semiotics-links.html>

Beaucoup à dire sur la "xéno-encyclopédie" (Richard Saint-Gelais) et la "compétence générique".... :think:
    Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image
    ۞ Shaihuludata gigantica Gratia, Fidei defensor ۞
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      Re: Project Concept

      Post by SandChigger »

      If you google "Galach", this page on my site comes up third now: http://galach.hairyticksofdune.net/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

      If you google "Galach conlang", it's number one.

      That's pretty scary considering there's no content there, huh?

      Here's some text that I had on the Galach portal, but I finally thought better of smacking Meyers a nasty from page one and removed it when I updated the layout the other day. (I also want to contact him about his DE contributions, so I figured it wasn't too cool in that respect as well. ;) )
      Why a new Galach? What about the Galach language description in The Dune Encyclopedia?

      The Galach language description included in The Dune Encyclopedia was written by Dr. Walter E. Meyers. While it is interesting as far as it goes, it has several serious problems in terms of "linguistic reality", which will be explained further below. First and foremost, however, it should be recognized that Dr. Meyers' "grammar" was intended as a simple method for transforming English into something else, not as a more serious description of an actual "fictional" language.

      Problems with Dr. Meyers' Galach Description

      First, it uses English alone as its base, despite the fact that Frank Herbert described Galach as "hybrid Inglo-Slavic."

      Second, the description begins with "Old Galach (7000 B.G. - 4000 B.G.)". The chronology based on the establishment of the Spacing Guild transportation monopoly takes as its origin a point in time 201 standard years after the beginning of the conflict commonly known as the Butlerian Jihad. Frank Herbert wrote that humankind "move[d] through deep space ... [for] one hundred and ten centuries [before] the Butlerian Jihad," indicating a time at least more than 11,201 years in our future. Dr. Meyers begins his description, then, more than 4,000 years from now ... longer than the entire current history of the English language. What happened in the interim?

      Third, the periods named are too long, and the changes which occur too few, for the description to have any credibility as a record of realistic (natural) linguistic change. For example, the Old Galach period mentioned above lasts 3,000 years (again, far longer than the history of written English in the real world), yet the description lists only 14 sound changes and 3 changes in word morphology. Considering how much English has changed in the last 1,000 years, this hardly seems realistic.

      Fourth, the description focuses primarily on phonological and morphological change and has very little to say about the syntax of the language in any period. There is more to language than sound and word forms. The complete lack of examples of complete sentences or connected passages of text is a serious flaw.

      Given the above, it would seem perhaps better to begin anew, rather than attempt to rectify the problems with the existing version....

      Updated March 11th, 2008
      I have to admit to a bit of stage fright about revealing stuff. The people who do this kind of thing for real are REALLY fanatical about it; I've learned that much from being on the conlang mailing list for better than a year. I used to play around with making my own languages when I was a kid (yes, fine, I was a weird and lonely kid ... feh!), but other than that/since then and before this, the most I'd done is make up little toy languages to test my students on the basic concepts of phonological and morphological analysis and historical reconstruction.

      Oh well, enough with the excuses, right? Marchons!
      "Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

      "Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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      Joseph-Vintimille Tariki Askaris
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      Re: Project Concept

      Post by ᴶᵛᵀᴬ »

      SandChigger wrote:
      First, it uses English alone as its base, despite the fact that Frank Herbert described Galach as "hybrid Inglo-Slavic."
      It's a Cold War-derived linguistic uchrony, i guess :think:
      SandChigger wrote: Dr. Meyers begins his description, then, more than 4,000 years from now ... longer than the entire current history of the English language. What happened in the interim? Third, the periods named are too long, and the changes which occur too few, for the description to have any credibility as a record of realistic (natural) linguistic change. For example, the Old Galach period mentioned above lasts 3,000 years (again, far longer than the history of written English in the real world), yet the description lists only 14 sound changes and 3 changes in word morphology. Considering how much English has changed in the last 1,000 years, this hardly seems realistic.
      Why did you compare Galach genesis with the historical english development ? You said "inglo-slavic" right ? So, indo-european parallelism seems more logical ? Or ancient egyptian & chinese (5000 years!!).
      SandChigger wrote: Fourth, the description focuses primarily on phonological and morphological change and has very little to say about the syntax of the language in any period. There is more to language than sound and word forms. The complete lack of examples of complete sentences or connected passages of text is a serious flaw.
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          SandChigger
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          Re: Project Concept

          Post by SandChigger »

          Askaris de Dar wrote:Why did you compare Galach genesis with the historical english development ? You said "inglo-slavic" right ? So, indo-european parallelism seems more logical ? Or ancient egyptian & chinese (5000 years!!).
          I'm just talking about time scales and referencing English history for comparison. Shakespeare, from 400 year ago, often requires footnotes to read. Chaucer, from 600 years ago, you have to study harder. Beowulf, from 1200 years ago, is practically in a foreign language. To assume that English 4,000 years from now will be the same as today makes no sense whatsoever.

          Ancient Egyptian and Chinese both have long histories, but the writing systems of both make it impossible to know exactly how words were pronounced. We can reconstruct and guess, but we can never be sure. (Until someone creates a time machine—don't hold your breath!—or someone learns to access genetic memory—even more unlikely. ;) )
          "Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

          "Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

          Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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          ionah
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          Re: Project Concept

          Post by ionah »

          SandChigger wrote:Shakespeare, from 400 year ago, often requires footnotes to read. Chaucer, from 600 years ago, you have to study harder. Beowulf, from 1200 years ago, is practically in a foreign language. To assume that English 4,000 years from now will be the same as today makes no sense whatsoever.
          same here with French.
          look at these new silly words they put each year in the Larousse and Robert :doh:
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          Re: Project Concept

          Post by SandChigger »

          What, you don't like new words?! :shock:

          I'm rather partial to this one I coined: yarden, to describe the little piece of land around where I now live, a combination of yard and garden. :P
          "Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

          "Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

          Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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          Re: Project Concept

          Post by ionah »

          SandChigger wrote:What, you don't like new words?! :shock:
          i do not mind the new words, it's the modern proof the fact that the language evolved since ages and still continue to evolve :)
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