<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto">On Aug 27, 2020, at 9:48 AM, Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:<blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><span>My top dozen:</span><br><span></span><br><span>American Sign Language</span><br><span></span><br><span>Japanese, because it's pretty, and for the movies</span><br><span></span><br><span>Spanish</span><br><span></span><br><span>whichever Chinese language is most spoken outside China</span><br><span></span><br><span>Lojban. (For a scifi conlang I'd take Lojban's syntax and replace its lexicon, with Japanesque phonotactics.)</span><br><span></span><br><span>Classical Arabic</span><br><span></span><br><span>proto-Malayo-Polynesian, to avoid choosing among its descendants</span><br><span></span><br><span>Classical Irish</span><br><span></span><br><span>Finnish, partly because I have several discs of songs in Finnish; partly because of Tolkien.</span><br><span></span><br><span>the ancestor of some large New World family, such as Na-Dene or Algic</span><br><span></span><br><span>Middle High German, as in the Carmina Burana; I like its flavor</span><br><span></span><br><span>Classical Chinese</span><br><span></span><br><span>...</span><br><span></span><br><span>and because there's no such thing as enough:</span><br><span></span><br><span>Hindi, for the movies</span><br><span></span><br><span>proto-Bantu</span><br><span></span><br><span>Plains Sign Talk</span><br><span></span><br><span>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).</span><br><span></span><br><span>Old Norse</span><br><span></span><br><span>proto-Italo-Celtic</span><br><span></span><br><span>Volapük</span><br><span></span><br><span>proto-Dravidian</span><br><span></span><br><span>British Sign Language</span><br></div></blockquote><br><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><div dir="ltr" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><div style="line-height: normal;"><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Regards,</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"><br></span></div><div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Dan</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"> Sample my Kindle books at:</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><p style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://author.to/DanUst</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>