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--- On Fri, 3/4/11, Carl Edlund Anderson <cea@hidden.email> wrote: >I suppose I might try to claim that there had "once upon a time" been >Greek, and loans entered in that "once upon a time", but since then Greek >had become extinct and all record of it lost .... :) >Of course, this being an imaginary conlanging situation, it would be >difficult to then explain why I couldn't say what this "lost Greek" >language looked like! ;) I dunno -- in the Eastlands of the World, there is a "once upon a time" language that was lost long ago and has left few traces beyond a number of loan words in surrounding languages. The one known surviving text, an inscription on the Crown, is well understood, though the actual translation is ambiguous to the point of being hardly well understandable at all. That is, the words make sense but the sense itself isn't terribly apparent. I don't see why you couldn't posit a situation like that. A number of loan words could exist, but no text of the lending language exists. It would be like some of the theories about English (and Germanic in general), which say that Germanic is some kind of creole language. But a creole with what and what is the source of our supposedly borrowed words? That other language no longer exists and we have no (easy) way of sorting it out. Or if every Latin text in existence were burned some time in the eighth century, French and Spanish would still evolve. And they would be clearly related, but there would be no record of their ancestor apart from a putative reconstruction. Padraic