Questions re: Historical Atlas and others


Posted by Glenn Kempf on 00:53 4/23/02

In reply to: Questions re: Historical Atlas and others posted by Glenn Kempf on 19:30 4/21/02

Sure, come on by. I'll break out the knigi russkovo jazyka.

Dogovorilis'! Hope to see you then...

Thanks for the report; the media here have basically forgotten all the ex-Soviet states. I've always been interested in Central Asia...

Too bad; I thought maybe some of the Afghanistan notoriety would wear off. If you have any more Central Asia-related questions, let me know, and I'll try to answer them.

As for Verdurian, all you have to do now is learn French, and you'll almost be able to read it...

I took French in high school, thirteen years ago; now if I could only remember it...

The different languages in city and country thing is not that uncommon. Another example, I think, is medieval Poland: Polish in the countryside, German and Yiddish in the cities. And there are still parts of Latin America where you find Spanish in the cities, Amerindian languages in the country.

Good point; the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) are another good example. There is a decent historical novel by an Estonian novelist available in English--_The Tsar's Madman_ by Jaan Kross--set in 18th-century Estonia (when the upper classes spoke German and Russian, and the peasantry Estonian); it features a German nobleman who marries an Estonian commoner and teaches her and her brother German and French, before running afoul of the Tsarist authorities. (The nobleman and his wife are real historical personages; the brother, who serves as narrator, is fictional.)

I note that you have included a number of multilingual settings in Almea (such as Belshai and, after a fashion, Dheknam), as well as language retained as scholarly/liturgical, while contributing to the modern vernacular (most prominently Cadhinor). There are certainly plenty of examples of the latter on our Earth (Latin, Old Church Slavonic), but it strikes me as a difficult phenomenon to do justice to in an invented setting; did you find it hard to do?

I'll be looking forward to further Almean developments, as well as referring regularly to the rest of your site--the news, the comics reviews, and especially the Language Construction Kit (which is how I found zompist.com in the first place). Poka!

Ad onlelan; ravec fue.

p@,
Glenn


Mark responds:

Hmm, the multiple languages weren't exactly difficult... just laborious. But I enjoy that part of it a lot. (Well, except for the fact that it's slow. It's easier to just make up words when you need them; I feel compelled to borrow existing words-- if I absolutely have to invent a root, I try to do it in an early language...)


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