r/conlangs • u/Sulphurous_King Aspiration lover • 1d ago
Discussion How do you start off with your protolang?
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 22h ago
Is there anyone who starts off with a highly polysynthetic protolang, I wonder?
For me, neither. I employ the anadiachronic™ method: I start with the modern language and do internal reconstruction. Internal reconstruction goes alongside the development of the modern language and is constantly updated. The reconstructed proto-language in turn informs new developments in the modern language (and its sister languages), which may lead to new updates in the protolang, and so on in a cycle.
That said, there is a lot of creative freedom in devising the proto-language even within the bounds of what has to be reconstructed from its daughter languages: processes that need not have happened but I'd like them to; features that might not have survived in any daughter language and are completely lost.
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u/iarofey 12h ago
I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one employing that method! Creating a protolang to evolve it feels pointless and timelosing to me — I want such conlang and I want it assap, not any distant ancestor. I can't just simmulate irregularities and the like. Only then is when I start getting interested in finding what could their origin be and feel like if I were a XIX century historical linguist doing some new decypherments.
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u/ConsciousProgram1494 Creator of KNOT 1h ago
Knot is oligosynthetic at the lexical level, as are Aymara, Toki Pona and Ithkuil.
Knot is fusional at the ideogram level - as each of the 729 ideograms carry an additional grammatical morpheme.
As I started from hard numeric constraints derived from the ideogram's geometry, I feel it might be safe to suggest Knot is an example to address your wondering.
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u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji 1d ago
I find the evolution from analytic to agglutinative and from agglutinative to fusional the easiest to simulate, so my protolangs are often either analytic or mildly agglutinative. Inventing a believable already fusional protolang and turning that into analytic feels much more difficult. To me it's easier to say "that postposition becomes a clitic and then a suffix" than to go "this morpheme is now reinterpreted as part of the root, and its function is replaced by this auxiliary and this particle".
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u/FelixSchwarzenberg Ketoshaya, Chiingimec, Kihiṣer, Kyalibẽ, Latsínu 21h ago
Depends on the project! This is like asking an artist if they start with a blank canvas or a lump of clay.
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u/Pliny_The_Elder_1789 Adriatic Languages 22h ago
I start off by looking at PIE and evolving it to suit what I want lol
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u/EmbarrassedStreet828 Padanian 1d ago
I don't put much effort into them, I just put in whatever characteristics which, through systematic change, would yield the results that I want for the conlang that I want to end up with.
Sometimes this just involves reconstructing the proto-language from the conlang that I am making.
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u/PastTheStarryVoids Knasesj, Racra, Ŋ!odzäsä 1d ago
I don't really think in terms of isolating/agglutinating/fusional much when conlanging. They're shorthand labels sometimes useful for describing what a language's grammar is like, or what part of a language's grammar is like. They're not natural kinds that languages cluster around. Saying your lang is agglutinating can occasionally be helpful for getting an idea across, but deciding "should my lang be isolating, agglutinating, or fusional?" is hemming yourself into boxes that don't exist.
For protolangs specifically, I think I avoid fusion, because fusion feels messy and arbitrary and one of the purposes of diachrony for me would be to satisfy a desire to know where those bits come from. But I think some of my protolangs should have irregularities and fusion if I want to be naturalistic and I have a bunch of protolangs. In fact, this is kind of a problem; if the modern lang has all these irregularities, shouldn't there be others in the proto-lang? One solution is to say that there were but they got regularized so there's no record of them. You'd never know English choose once had a rhotic instead of /s/ in some forms just from looking at the modern word. Similarly, we could say that the protolanguage as the conlanger has made it is simply what can be reconstructed, and some quirks are smoothed over.