
Vandalon (Ganglais) started as the simplest imaginable exercise: spend some month creating a fully* Germanic Frenchlang to study how linguistics work, before switching back to the "serious" a-priori stuff for my sci-fi conworld. The rules were as simple as restrictive: Modern French phonology. No exceptions. No Greek or Latin loanwords - Germanic roots for everything (this rule was later amended by incorporation of pre-Indo-European loanwords). Pedantry follows Aesthetics - derivation rules are there to create a feeling, not to follow actual historic pattern. What should have been a few week's exercise became a life's project. I've never returned to "serious" stuff - instead, I came to consider it boringly arbitrary and uninventive. Nor did I return to that sci-fi setting. Instead, a heterotopia closely resembling yet drastically different from actual humanity's history evolved around it, full of languages based on similar idea.
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As a french this is really interesting, I've thought once about what if french rooted from other languages than greek and latin, it's really fun ! I also love the flag it looks very realistic, if I didn't know it was a conflag and you showed it to me I would think it is the flag of a region.
Can't wait to see more
Thanks. I've had more on ConWorkShop, and I slowly pull y stuff towards here. As to the flag, I was once returning to Germany from a trip to the Louvre, and while crossing the Meuse, I thought that my hybrid of German and French needs a flag and a symbol. It was then that Vandalian Cross was born as an extramarital child of Fleur de Lis and Eisenkreuz. The flag is thus both of the conlang and the concounty. I never gave it a proper name though... I guess "Croix de Lis" then, since Teh Roolz allow to just borrow words of non-Indo-European and uncertain origin. I'll see what esle I can pull over here.
Shall it be interesting to see how your language turns out... :)
Thanks for your interest :D It's a quite old one, tbh, already won a A Posteriori conlang of the year award on CWS. But I left CWS for ideological reasons, and now slowly doing everything from scratch here. Here is a text example. It is a perpetual WIP, but I guess it can give you some feeling https://lingocon.com/lang/vandalon/texts/neuromancer-by-william-gibson-ch-1-chiba-city-blue
Nice i never heard of CWS cool you got a award on it. Also i can read your exsample text when i feel i have a good time for it.... i also am working on my own language i been working on it for a while now really i started i think over 800 days ago with the name Yadelovin for my language after lost a older one technically but with a different name. But i say it about 800 days old if not count anything before it... any help or ideas you can give me would be great i do all the making of my language by my self with help from other sources to get ideas or to for example build off of other languages yet i still make sure it matches my language grammer and alphabet meanings... maybe you can take a look at it my dictionary is small right now as i am fixing it up and making it in layers now so i have the core then i go on until Late Classical Yadelovin then i can let people use that to form Early Modern Yadelovin. I not have to many perhaps to show my language to and help improve it but i plan to still work on it.. also good luck on yours. Best regards.
Yeah, uh, almost 3 years is actually much time. Many people lack such a persistence - not a good thing, not a bad thing, just not their thing. You don't choose your addiction, it chooses you :D I actually have very little in terms of advice. Like, I've been working on Vandalon for years, thought it would be the only one of mine, with perhaps one more coming to the frey one day - and then suddenly got nine. All of them, however, are built with the same system - namely, they are very minimal. Say, for Vandalon, I use only Proto-Germanic rules plus very ancient loanwords, and keep the sound as French as possible. This may sound lazy - I would've thought of it as lazy when I started conlanging - but it actually makes you proactively think sound change rules that will suit your concept. I call this thing Mimiconlang - a conlang that is derived from an actual natlang, and looks like an actual natlang, but from a different language family. This works well for me, but it is not a recipe for everyone. I believe what you are doing is great you should definitely continue. My piece of advice, that works universally - math, architecture, art, software development - is to pay attention not only to how much you can add, but also what you can creatively spare on.
Say, mixing a lot of languages is a valid thing - but it is worth ask yourself: why is the language so mixed. What made all those words appear then. True, one can always say that it is a creole that came to be in a colony where a lot of people have been brought upon for slave labor and what not - but, like, there are so many of such languages. I for one have my own conlang that is mostly made of loanwords - still very small one called Rätzendl. It looks like German and based off Etruscan, spoken in IRL Switzerland. Problem with Etruscan is that not that many of its words are preserved, and those are restricted to very narrow contexts of funerary inscriptions. And so I have to borrow, but when I do, I mostly restrict myself again to words of Pre-Indo-European origin in Latin and Greek that I make look like German. And there is a natural language that shares such a characteristic - this is Armenian, which, while preserving its Indo-European core dictionary and structure, replaced everything else with loanwords as ancient as those from Sumerian. Perhaps, you have a similar vision for Yadelovin. Would be interesting to read.
Thanks for your reply, also do you know a way i can learn like anything that can help like language terms or know any books, i looked but did not find any books matching really. Also my language is built around the idea of a man who traveled in around 1800 when it was reasonable historically to travel safely, then i looked up the history, so i also tried picking what i could and i got 10 languages not including Yadelovin (where i make words based on itself), i had also influence from other languages but it not ment to be clear, as i also changed what the languages i wanted it based off of and starting making the words over again... but it has like letter meaning and grammar so some words stay the same perhaps or similar. And i wanted Chinese also but truns out china was closed to outsiders or something durring that time or be unreasonable and also it kind of far as i imagined the man came from Britian knowing English, anyway he learns other languages, but this backstory is made up, i do plan though to make the language into Classical Yadelovin which is the actual spoken language and words may be added or change over time with influence of other languages, then we go into Early Modern where we use the Late Classical of the language in actual spoken form, if that happens of course it be good will see who i can teach my language to other then myself... but yeah.
So the goal is for it to be a easy to use and understand language globally while still being expressive yet also fun and enjoyable, also easy to pronunce to some extent as the pronunciation can vary as long as it is in a certain way it is fine... like pronunciation of the sound à meaning you pronounce the a backward somehow of course i have my way where i amy voice it in the dictionary if anyone needs help. Thanks for saying you think i am doing good job or at lest saying i should continue or something i think, i hope to get the language in layers done, aiming for about 7000 words in the long run should cover a good amount. I also have guidance by looking at my old 6000+ words list on LingoJam.com and other languages as well as making sure they match my alphabet. But i can take my time so, but i hope to get 700 important words first soon, then i can use that as main reference to make any word. :) sorry lot of info. But that is i think all to mention.
If you want a *real* advice, then here is the one I can give. Don't aim for the number of words. I devised Vandalon in about 2013, started creating a real dictionary - not some pencil scribbles on a random piece of paper - in 2017, really boosted things in 2020. I have just about... 5000 words. But each of this words is a friend of mine. I know its origins, I know its descendants in other Germanic languages, I know if it is from PIE or not just by looking at it. Quantity ≠ Beauty. I see that you pick those words and adapt their phonetic to suit the overall tone of your language - that's great. I mean, there are so many hodgepodge languages where they just throw everything together. That's so annoying! Another advice, from someone who had to learn it the hard way. Write which word you derive each one. Not just English translation - the word in original language you have derived it from, and better yet, add the URL to the Wiktionary article with this word. Trust me, unless you have a photographic memory and can memorize first million digits of the number π like Apu from The Simpson, you will forget, and then look at the word and struggle to remember what the heck the prototype was. Your story is original, it's not like that typical creole thing. I didn't completely comprehend it yet, but I guess you could tell me in more detail how the languages learned by your traveller relate to Yadelovin. Anyway, I find it fresh, and it is both rooted in and fosters your interest to real history, then you, me and your traveller are on the same exciting journey. May I recommend you the book "Transformation of the World" by Jürgen Osterhammel? It is a absolutely tremendous work on the everyday life in 19th century, and is still available to download for free at archive.com. A great read to boost the knowledge about the era you seem to be interested in. Keep it going.