[conlang_learners] criteria for IE

[Padraic Brown]

--- On Fri, 6/19/09, Dayle Hill <dwhmusic32 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Can anyone clear this up for me. Talking about IE
> languages...but in this context, conlangs of IE influence
> and style. Is it assumed that a conlang can only be termed
> IE if it shares a majority of IE lexicon? Especially in the
> Germanic lingos...for example

I would imagine that a language is IE if its ancestral form was an IE language, and so forth all the way back to PIE. Thus, you can trace English back to Anglo-Saxon to West Germanic to Primitive Germanic to IE.

I think lexicon helps identify a language as IE, but I think its the meat of the language -- the grammar especially -- that clinches it. That and historical relationships. (Presumably, it is possible for a language to become *un*-IE through attrition of all the grammatical wossnames that are hallmarks of IE langauges (someone has already mentioned the veral system (it might be noted that English's verbal system is *quite* different from French or Spanish or Latin or Greek) and the neut.nom./acc. identity of forms (well, English lacks that distinction too in several dialects though "it" itself remains a fixture of the standard dialect))).

> English
> Scots
> West Frisian
> Dutch
> Low Saxon
> German
> Gothic
> Icelandic
> Faroese
> Swedish
> Danish
> Norwegian (Nynorsk)
> 
> Apple
> Aiple
> Apel
> Appel
> Appel
> Apfel
> Aplus
> Epli
> Epl(i)
> Äpple
> Æble
> Eple
>  
> You see, I term my conlang as being full of IE traits,
> but lexically speaking, probably less than 10% of words are
> derived from any Germanic language, or in fact Slavic,
> Romance or otherwise, therefore I'm not really sure if
> it would actually be classed as an IE conlang.

What's the grammar like? I have one conlang (not at all well described) that was apparently an Aryan language in the distant past but has become so changed in its grammatical structures that it's IE nature is not readily obvious from that direction. If it weren't for a number of apparently native IE words, the language could be classified as entirely non-IE.

> Grammatically, it is similar to IE, with prepositions,
> adverbs, nom/acc case for pronouns etc...but then there are
> many syntactical rules that are, in my opinion,
> unique.

Some examples? Particles, adverbs and some kind of case-like structure are not exactly uncommon and I don't think are necessarily diagnostic of IE. For example, Philippine languages have particles that act like prepositions in English: ha iscuela = at school; may asin = with salt. But it also has some oddments of IE number (obviously in borrowed words!, but I'm always on the look out for mestizo na grammar): a las cuatro = four o'clock; mga portas = the doors. The grammar works entirely differently and obviously is non-IE -- my point is simply that how your language uses all these bits and pieces and how it puts everything together both at present and during its past history is what will tell you whether it's IE or not.

> Any ideas? (I ask this because of the unbiast opinions
> against IE conlangs for this project)

Padraic