[ExI] language lust

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Aug 27, 2020, at 9:48 AM, Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 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

I was thinking Proto-<insert language or language family here>, but looking over what’s believed to be PIE and Proto-Semitic, it probably wouldn’t help much in learning those languages descendants... I imagine the same is true for Precolumbian American languages, PAN, etc. Also, many of these languages were pre-literate, so I presume some of the language change was faster than, say, the change from Latin to a modern Romance language. Writing often acts as a conservative force as well as a standardizing one. 

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
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