From: Christophe Grandsire (christophe.grandsire@free.fr)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 22:12:58 EST
En réponse à Eamon Graham <robertg@awod.com>:
> Greetings Romanceconlang!
>
Bienvenue! ;))
> Some of you may know me from Celticonlang, but I realise I haven't
> contributed too much to Romanceconlang, even though I've been
> subscribed for sometime. I'll give a short introduction and then
> discuss a couple projects I'm working on. My name is Eamon Graham
> and I live in the lovely town of Angers, France.
Although I'm not from Angers, and I never ever went there, I second that
opinion anyway, from what I know of the place. I intend to go in holidays
around there next year (may be a good opportunity to meet ;))) ). As a French
guy living in the Netherlands, going in holidays in France takes a whole new
dimension ;))) .
Although my formal
> education is in philosophy and psychology (and, oddly, accounting)
Although I can feel that someone need psychology to do accounting ;))) .
> I've been studying linguistics on my own since an early age,
> concentrating mostly on historical and compartive linguistics and
> creolistics. Also, since the age of 9, I've been in to conlanging.
> When I first arrived on the Internet I was excited to see so many
> talented people - and terribly smart too - who did the same thing.
We're just pretending, don't feel too humble ;))))) .
> Until then, my only resource on the field of conlanging was an
> article in an encyclopedia by linguist Mario Pei (which was actually
> more about Auxlangs). (My first conlang was actually an odd
> combination of the Gaelic I heard growing up, the Welsh my sister
> was studying and the Russian I had started learning from a library
> book)
>
Well, there has been some claims that the Cyrillic alphabet would be more
suited to Celtic languages than the Roman alphabet, but that was only for
Gaelic IIRC. :))
> Being in the middle of a lazy French summer (and rather rainy French
> summer forcing me indoors quite a bit),
The weather has not been good? Well, I may think again about my projects of
holidays then... ;))))
I've been working on three
> conlang projects simultaneously and two of them may be of interest
> to our Romanceconlang family.
>
> The first originally started with the idea of a group of urban
> nomads, much like the Yeniche.
Who/what are the Yeniche?
My nomadic group lives in France and
> their French was shaped very much by non-standard varieties of
> French - "popular French," local dialects, French creoles, etc. -
> and the Occitan language.
I can understand for local dialects and Occitan, but creoles?
My name for this language was going to be
> - and may still be - "Caminaire" from a Provencal word meaning
> "traveller."
Is the -aire ending really Provençal? It looks suspiciously too French to me...
The grammar might place it in the realm of the
> creoloid language - there's no grammatical gender, verb conjugations
> are reduced, etc - but not fully creolised, and there was no
> pidginisation phase. Pronunciation and vocabulary is based on local
> dialects and creoles. I also became inspired by overseas varieties
> of French such as Cajun and Quebecois - and two recent trips to
> Belgium further added non-standard inspiration. This forced me to
> bend my conhistory quite a bit to explain the presence of people
> from Louisiana and Quebec in my nomadic group, but World War I and
> the inter-war era helped me out here.
>
LOL, quite a melting pot your language :)) .
> My second language was inspired by several theses I've studied on
> Portuguese semi-creoles and Spanish creoles, leading me to the
> creation of a fictional Spanish semi-creole. The basis for this
> language is Latin American varieties of Spanish (I have fond
> connections and friends in Mexico and Argentina as well as an
> adventurer grandfather who spent some time in revolutionary Cuba) as
> well as the few Spanish Creoles (Palenquero, Chabacano and the
> partially Spanish Papiamento). Most of the remaining inspiration
> comes from working by analogy from Portuguese semi-creoles in Brazil
> and elsewhere. I have no conhistory for it as of yet, and this is a
> nameless language so far, but I hope to come up with something
> nice. Tangent: I'm really bad at coming up with language names;
> devising a euphonic name for a conlang is an art in itself, n'est
> pas?
>
En effet ! J'ai exactement le même problème ! Pour mon narbonnois (dans la
langue |narbonósc|, il m'a fallu plusieurs mois pour trouver un nom convenable.
> Sadly, I don't have anything really to present about either of these
> languages right now, but I hope to get a website up real soon. At
> any rate, I wanted to take some time to introduce my two projects
> and to say "hola" to the group!
>
You did well. Welcome again!
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.
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