Citizen names and linguistics

I didn’t so much make the structure simpler, as I omitted some articles, such as the. I also use the concept ajoint modifiers. Words modify other words by being connected via apostrophe. When spoken, the two words run together in a sing song way and their sharper endings become softened.

“A large cat” would become “a big’cat”

The recreated language has maybe a hundred words, though this is only a sample of what would probably be much more extensive if real.

Cool, lotus253, then it was just the way you phrased that made me think you aimed at simplifying the structure. Again this is just a side remark to what you say about adjectives - but in fact all words run together :slight_smile: You chose to make a change in the way you write it down, which is just a cultural convention - if you’re listening to a passage in a language you don’t know, you generally won’t be able to tell where the word boundaries are, because there are no pauses between words that you can hear.

Anyway, that has little to with the game and is not useful to its development, I was just compelled to write it :slight_smile: Same goes for what follows.

nuLoon, well, firstly - what we can observe is that there are no differences in overall complexity and expressiveness between today’s langauges, regardless of the culture and society of the people who speak them, including less technologically advanced, primitive - anthropologists, please offer a more appropriate contemporary term used in the field - cultures. It goes without saying, but it’s maybe worth emphasizing nevertheless, language complexity has nothing to do with the existence of written language; writing is a cultural invention that has existed for a much shorter time than our species’ linguistic ability. Here’s some interesting reading:

Next, looking at languages spoken in the past that we have a record of, going back a handful of millenia, show the same levels of structural complexity. The very beginnings of language (another several tens of thousands years earlier, most likely) are shrouded in mystery, since there cannot be any direct linguistic archeological evidence - yet the properties of human language suggest that its appearance in today’s form was rather sudden; it has properties that qualitatively distinguish the human language system from animal communication, so it’s not just a quantitative evolution of a more primitive system of our immediate ancestors and closest relatives that the modern human (sub)species just got better at with extra intelligence. On the topic of evolution of language faculty, a seminal paper is this following one written in collaboration between biologists and linguists, and I also add a link to an accessible blog on these matters:

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/hauser.chomsky.fitch.science2002.pdf

OK, this was quite enough, sorry for the length :slight_smile:

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With all authenticity and immersion, we should not forget that even well-educated players want to be in the game. We play at this time and will certainly understand our contemporaries and communicate understandable.
But interesting discussion, please more! :+1:

I’m writing an online translator for my recreated Neolithic language, but nothing that complicated LOL

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reconstructed indoeuropean? Like Wenja?

Not sure about that one.
Mine has PIE as a data point, but I also used other languages to backwards derive a language.
If you speak PIE, you will likely recognize similarities now and then.
But I have like 5 languages in the books, each quite different lol

It’s the language spoken by the Wenja tribe in Far Cry Primal, created by David J. Peterson (I love this man so much)

but, that’s interesting. I don’t have a lick of PIE training, but i can speak a lil bit of Wenja lol, only a few words and phrases though.

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Aes-Kaelu eahg’nom.

That’s, “my name is Ember,” in my main characters language. Anyone who has studied PIE should quickly note a few similarities LOL

I’m surprised you’d use PIE though, I mean PIE existed nearly 3,000 years after your setting during the Yamnaya Horizon (think about how much Medieval French changed from PIE by comparison. Besides PIE was spoken in the Ukranian Steppe, not in the Near East (an area where a completely different language family developed).

Are there no Afroasiatic Langauges that can be used for a reconstruction?

I mean, considering the locations in Anatolia, Proto-hitite was around since 4000 bc and is splinter off of indo-european. I know this is not my area of knowledge by a long shot, I don’t know what language they spoke in anatolia ca. 5500 bc

@Sargon Proto-Hittite and the Anatolian Languages split of before the development of PIE proper however, a lot of cognates and grammatical features that appear in the rest of PIE based languages are missing in the Anatolian languages. So Proto-Anatolian broke off from PIE before PIE itself developed beyond a very Archaic state, (as I mentioned an event strongly connected with the Yamnaya Horizon towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE) think of the difference between the English spoken in 1066 (Edi Beo thu from the 1200’s) and what is spoken today. David Anthony links it with the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka migration around a thousand years before (~4200 BCE as you said). I’m not 100% convinced by this because I have not read anything about how S-N people or language might have spread from the lower danube into Anatolia, but at the same time I haven’t seen a better explanation.

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It was a single data point. I used several others.
I only used fit for one of the languages as a single data point.

In the end, we have no real knowledge of what was spoken at that time. We can infer things about what the language from that time may have been like, but that’s about the best that can be done.

Fair play, but I do think that reconstructed linguistics gets a much worse knock than it deserves from us on the Archaeology side of the field.

For me, I needed a consistent reconstructed language for my characters to speak as opposed to the usual ugh you find in prehistoric fiction. Unfortunately, regardless of how much research I put into it, I am neither a linguist nor an archaeologist. My background is computer science. Though I have dedicated years to research, there is a limit to my authenticity that would require advanced knowledge of archaeology and linguistics that I simply don’t have. =/

I was mostly wondering if there are any reconstructed Afroasiatic languages. PIE has had generations of work put into it, but I’m unaware of a single study that has been done on finding Proto-Afroasiatic or an equivalent (even though the fact that written language extending so much further back for that language family should enable us to make a better reconstruction I’d think).
edit I have heard of some Proto-Uralic words being reconstructed though, so maybe I just haven’t stumbled across the literature?

I use AP language for one of my characters, as well as several traders who stopped by at one point. I don’t reconstruct the entire language just a few word approximations.

Of course not! Whole careers have been spent reconstructing dead languages! :smiley:

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A post was split to a new topic: AI invent new language

And Klingon.:grinning: