[ExI] language lust

[Anton Sherwood]

My top dozen:

American Sign Language

Japanese, because it's pretty, and for the movies

Spanish

whichever Chinese language is most spoken outside China

Lojban.  (For a scifi conlang I'd take Lojban's syntax and replace its 
lexicon, with Japanesque phonotactics.)

Classical Arabic

proto-Malayo-Polynesian, to avoid choosing among its descendants

Classical Irish

Finnish, partly because I have several discs of songs in Finnish; partly 
because of Tolkien.

the ancestor of some large New World family, such as Na-Dene or Algic

Middle High German, as in the Carmina Burana; I like its flavor

Classical Chinese

...

and because there's no such thing as enough:

Hindi, for the movies

proto-Bantu

Plains Sign Talk

Etruscan -- I'd pass it off as my own conlang. ;)  Etruscan interests me 
partly because I suspect that a large fraction of Roman names come from 
Etruscan.  Latin is (afaik) the only major branch of Indo-European that 
lacks a tradition of dithematic names (like Will-helm, Vladi-mir, 
Aristo-sthenes).

Old Norse

proto-Italo-Celtic

Volapük

proto-Dravidian

British Sign Language

-- 
*\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org