Zompist Bboard Again

Albanian is, like Armenian, a "foundling" among the IE languages; its prehistory is obscure, its native vocabulary attenuated, its sound developments idiosyncratic and not really well understood, and thus nobody knows for sure where to put it. Daniel Bensen may be misguided about the relationship between Thracian and Albanian, or just cherry-picking. As far as I can tell, there is no consensus either on Thracian nor on Proto-Albanian, so he could pick a version of Thracian and one of Proto-Albanian which were close enough. He is not an academic scholar; he is just, like me, a writer and conlanger who has invented a fictional secretive ethnic group in the Balkans who apparently stand in a similar relationship to vampires as mine do to elves.

Re Thracian, Alexai Kassian has recently argued that the IE character of Thracian has not been conclusively proven. If what he presents as IE etymologies for Thracian words, that looks indeed dubious - many of them far-fetched, the cognates being restricted to various individual languages and late formations in those languages, etc. We would need more words or longer texts with clearly IE morphology to actually prove the IE character of Thracian.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Sun May 31, 2026 12:57 pm Re Thracian, Alexai Kassian has recently argued that the IE character of Thracian has not been conclusively proven. If what he presents as IE etymologies for Thracian words, that looks indeed dubious - many of them far-fetched, the cognates being restricted to various individual languages and late formations in those languages, etc. We would need more words or longer texts with clearly IE morphology to actually prove the IE character of Thracian.

Hmm, interesting. Kassian is a scholar whom I don't have much confidence in, but that doesn't mean that he is wrong this time. If Thracian was indeed non-IE, that of course would invalidate any claims that Albanian descended from it!

Re. earlier: Indeed, a number of Thracian words, names and short texts have been recorded. From there, you can deduce the most salient sound changes and triangulate the rest; large gaps in vocabulary can be filled in with loanwords, a la Albanian and Armenian.

Zju wrote: ↑Sun May 31, 2026 2:34 pm Re. earlier: Indeed, a number of Thracian words, names and short texts have been recorded. From there, you can deduce the most salient sound changes and triangulate the rest; large gaps in vocabulary can be filled in with loanwords, a la Albanian and Armenian.

Yes, as a conlanger, you can "cheat" this way with impunity; it is different if you are doing historical linguistics. If you do both, you always have to be aware which hat you are wearing at the moment!

For a culture in my conworld, I wanted the language to sound vaguely familiar, and somewhat influenced by IE; not unlike what I'd call the Standard Fantasy Language (Valyrian?)

An idea occured to me... why not go straight for an IE descendant? And I think I'll go for as boring a IE language as possible (basically Latin+Gaulish), and for the modern day descendant, basically Old French (which I always wanted to do something with.)

Many people consider it wrong to have a posteriori conlangs in a fantasy world because "the nations who speak the language don't exist there", but hey, most fantasy writers have animals from our world, such as horses, dogs, and, most importantly, humans - so why not also languages? Such resemblance with real-world languages is no more unlikely than real-world fauna and flora!

And because they are meant to exist in the real world, I like the style of the ancient IE languages ever since I learned Latin in school, and I find it easier to build an a posteriori than an a priori language, I have decided that my Elves would speak an IE and thus a posteriori conlang.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jun 04, 2026 5:30 am Many people consider it wrong to have a posteriori conlangs in a fantasy world because "the nations who speak the language don't exist there", but hey, most fantasy writers have animals from our world, such as horses, dogs, and, most importantly, humans - so why not also languages? Such resemblance with real-world languages is no more unlikely than real-world fauna and flora!

I’ve often had this exact thought. I’ve been tempted to try sneak a para-Vasconic language of some sort into my own conworld. (Though as I say this it immediately becomes less appealing as I’ve given the hint away…)

I'm tempted to place Proto-Germanic in a region of my conworld and just create language sketches from it to fill out an otherwise empty region of the map

I'm working on a descendant of what is attested of Crimean Gothic, I've went through several different drafts or variations of the concept but never have stuck with something being "the one." The difficulty is mostly the extremely scant material on it, and the material that does exists is contradictory or limiting (in not a good way.)