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Re: [romanceconlang] Greetings and Intro to my projects



En réponse à Eamon Graham <robertg@hidden.email>:

> 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.