Qwynegold wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2019 4:09 pm
Are people still working on this? I'm following this thread, although I don't have anything to contribute myself.
I've posted my theories. The basic phonological nature of the protolang is pretty well understood. But I think working out the syntax and vocabulary of the protolang is impossible without identifying specific morphemes, which is where I and others hit a wall.
I ran a few experiments that didn't get posted here, to try and determine what we can guess about the syntax. I looked at word frequencies, frequencies of words appearing together, and the order of constituents, and used WALS to see if there were any clues from these patterns that could tell us parts of speech. But sadly, unless we can confirm that these are distant children of present-day English, it's impossible to say for certain what the significance of these patterns might be.
As you can see from my previous comment, I also shamefully checked Sal's blog to see if there were any languages from his futuristic setting that fit the languages presented. So there is some activity behind the scenes, but I think it's safe to say this thread isn't going to yield a detailed description of the protolang without more information. Sal, if you're reading this, I like the idea of not giving us glosses or translations, but maybe if we had more sentences we could run some computational analysis on them. If we had some knowledge of the context (are these unearthed religious texts?) we might even be able to infer something about TAM or vocabulary.