Well I've already posted to this list at least once, so I might as well talk
about myself for a bit.
I'm a 29 year-old currently unemployed musician/computer geek from Lufkin,
Texas, who dabbles in linguistics, politics, issues, religion, TV and food.
I was a member of the indoeurpean and nostratic lists, but left because...
well, they just suck. (Plus some wiseacre started talking racist garbage.)
But I've paroused Cyril's pages since I've always been into IE (and
Nostratic when I discovered the theory). It's actually helped me in
learning modern languages, especially Farsi (I was engaged to an Iranian
immigrant in 1998; I wanted to impress the inlaws). I speak Spanish more
than anything else, with lesser degrees of French, German and Russian.
I also am a glossopoeist (I make up languages). I am a member of the
CONLANG and AUXLANG lists (also at egroups.com). I'm aspiring to be a
writer, and I got a sci-fi/fantasy world made up in my head. I want to turn
it into an RPG or a novel. I also got some less outlandish ideas for books.
My current artificial language projects are: Tech (based on Nostratic,
spoken by an African people living in the West Indies), Quaelitz (a
Sumerian-based language spoken by elves in the Middle East), Doh (spoken by
Orcs in Antarctica and similar to Klingon in some ways) Callistian (an
IE-based language spoken on the fictitious Mediterranean island of
Callisto). The last of these is obviously one reason I'm here.
Right now, I'm scouring the Indo-European Database for ideas. Right now I'm
researching Glen and Patrick's pages on proto-IE, and doing comparisons with
Uralic and Kartvelian, of noun cases, pronouns and basic verbal theory. I'm
also researching how IE gender compares to Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian gender
(I might look at North Caucasian for the heck of it). Except the only Kart.
language I know anything about is Georgian (and you also have Megrelian,
Swan and Laz), and I haven't had a chance to look over any Finnish or
Hungarian pages yet. (Is there a proto-Uralic out there on the web?)
But I don't want to start a big Nostratic debate since this is an IE list.
I used to know the traditional noun case system -- for all three numbers and
genders, and all vowel stems -- but I lost what I had written down. I
checked out Patrick and Glen's reconstructions, but I'd still like to see
the traditional proposed noun case system.
By the way, Callistic is a very conservative IE language with Sanskrit-like
noun declension and Greek/Latin-like verb inflection, a Grimm's Law shift (p
> ph, b > p, bh > p) and it is a satem language with preserved labiovelars
(k^ > ch /tSh/, g^ > c /tS/, g^h /dZ/) and some preserved laryngeals,
represented only by <h> with the appropriate vowel shifts for H1, H2, H3...
Daniel A. Wier ����
Lufkin, Texas USA
http://communities.msn.com/DannysDoubleWideontheWeb
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