[conlang_learners] IE vs non IE

[Jim Henry]

2009/6/14 Olivier Simon <cafaristeir at yahoo.com>:

> I'd like to recall that IE does not limit itself to Romance and Germanic.

Of course.

> Thus Esperanto's vocabulary is, of course, mostly IE since it rests mainly
> on Romance with some germanic elements, but does not represent the whole of
> IE languages spoken nowadays.

I don't think I implied that it did.

> Its grammar is agglutinative, while IE is
> synthetic.

I know, that's why I said it has "approximately IE-like grammar".
Yes, it's agglutinative rather than synthetic, and it has an
unnaturally small amount of sandhi even for an agglutinative language.
 But the choice of grammatical categories to mandatorily inflect for,
vs. categories that are optionally expressed with adverbs or
periphrasis, is clearly based on IE languages (Slavic as well as
Germanic and Romance). -- I've been in debates about this before and I
don't want to get into one here, interesting though the topic is in
itself; if you want to pursue it further, let's take it to AUXLANG or
offlist.

> Maybe you meant "something not exclusively Western European".
> IE languages

No, I meant "not based on IE languages, whether an altlang derived by
hypothetical sound changes from Proto-IE or Vulgar Latin or
Proto-Germanic like Urianian or Brithenig or Da Mätz se Basa, or an
auxlang borrowing vocabulary heavily from and imitating the
grammatical categories of one or more IE languages like Esperanto or
Interlingua".   Although there's a scale of gradations here, at least
w.r.t. my preferences -- I can't speak for others who would disprefer
an IE-based conlang at least for a project like this, but I would
disprefer a Romance- or Germancic-based conlang more than a
proto-Celtic or proto-Baltic or proto-IE based conlang, and would most
like to learn an *a priori* artlang or engelang.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/