AHC Alternate or Surviving Languages

[ramones1986]

Language: Luuk

Official Language: The Philippines (one of the official languages and principal native lingua franca)

Region: The Philippines, most specifically in the region between Manila Bay and the Pacific coast.

Family: Austronesian -> Malayo-Polynesian -> Philippine -> Proto-Philippine -> Luuk

Writing System: Kawi (Abugida)

Loan Words:
Through the course of history: Austronesian (Paiwanese, Malayic-Chamic, Javanese and Barito), Sinitic (Southeast Chinese), Japonic, Dravidian (Tamil), Semitic, Indo-European (Castilian Spanish and English), Native American languages (indirectly).

Details:
This language is prominently featured in my current Philippine-centered TL, currently on extended hiatus due to OTL circumstances (e.g. RL work, the need to rewrite from the start, and the pandemic).

 

[Igor MGTOW]

Language: Alexandrian Persian
Official Language: Macedonian Empire
Region: Persia Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia
Family: Indo-European -> Indo-Iranian -> Western Iranian -> Southwestern Iranian -> Persian -> Alexandrian Persian (OTL Middle Persian with more greek influence)
Writing System: Traditional Greek alphabet
Loan Words: 40% Koine Greek
History: Alexander the Great never dies and consolidates the empire building more cities temples and moving in more settlers and thus a variant of Persian is created with more greek influence and it even becomes the Official language of the Macedonian Empire

 

[funnyhat]

I've thought Coptic surviving (as an everyday language) would be pretty interesting.

 

[Igor MGTOW]

I've thought Coptic surviving (as an everyday language) would be pretty interesting.

you are correct it would be an intresting alternate scenario

 

[Igor MGTOW]

Language: Nile River Mycenaean
Official Language: Kingdom of New Mycenae
Region: New Mycenae (OTL Egypt and Nubia)
Family: Indo European -> Hellenic -> Mycenaean Greek -> Nile River Mycenaean
Loan Words: 20% Doric
Writing Script: Linear B and Greek alphabet
History: 20 years before the Collapse of Mycenaean greece a group of Mycenaeans Conquer Egypt and Established the Kingdom of New Mycenae After a few years Mycenaean Greeks Became a Majority and the native Egyptians were assimilated into the new culture When the Mycenaean Civilization in greece eventually fell and collapse due to migrations some mycenaeans fled to the kingdom of new mycenae and settled there to avoid becoming helots some helots did escaping adding doric loan words to nile river mycenaean and its still spoken today

 

[Byzantion]

Your challenge should you choose to accept it is to make alternate or surviving languages you can even make a language map if you want to.

This thread was inspired by the Caravels of Portugal Alternate Ethnicities thread

Example:

Graeco-Indian
Official Language: Indo Greek Kingdom
Language Family: Indo European -> Hellenic -> Koine Greek -> Graeco-Indian
Writing Script: Traditional Greek Alphabet, Perso-Arabic, Devanagari
Loan words: 30% Hindi and 10% Persian

Old Afro Asiatic Giz is the predecessor of Tigrinya, Tigre, Amharic, etc. It is today still the liturgic language of Orthodoc churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea but as a common language died out. Similar like Latin I guess.

 

[WilliamOfOckham]

Ima just go and start from the beginning, if we are going be evolution beliefs.

We, as basic beings will imitate sound, what if we do that then draw the shape of the object/animal that makes its corresponding sound.
Object: sound: letter
Examples:
Tree= airnk= A line with an arrow facing up an top.
Dry leaves= crrik= and oval with a zigzag through it.
Sheep= Mbaa= an oval with bumps.

I don’t know if you’re serious about this, but this is not how semiotics works at all. There is no evidence that language “originally” arose as onomatopoeia (in fact, there’s negative circumstantial evidence in that other primates, many of which have quite complex vocalisations, don’t really use anything we might call onomatopoeia; human language almost certainly arose from similar vocalisations among ancestor hominids), and even if it did, onomatopoeia is a cultural process for which there is no simple logic. A sheep may make the sound “m/baa”, but that’s not how the concept “a sheep” sounds except when mediated through a cultural logic.

Maybe sheep are a bad example, because the sound they make is so distinctive and so easy for humans to imitate. Better example: what does the concept “a stone” sound like? Does it sound like the sound a stone makes when it falls to the ground, the sound it makes when it hits another stone, the sound it makes when it’s rolled onto its side, or the sound it makes when it cuts into meat? All of those are very different sounds, and early humans would have known all of those sounds intimately; moreover, the human vocal apparatus can’t convey any of them very well at all. That’s why it’s impossible to have a pure, cultureless language, let alone assert that one existed in the past. Humans are cultural animals, and our experience is never not mediated through culture. The idea that early humans lived through direct, self-evident experience, though extremely common, is contradicted by the human experience itself; that is to say, it’s impossible to discover the universe as it “really” is through human perception.

That’s not even mentioning writing (“letters”), which only arose about six thousand years ago and began an immense cognitive revolution - one that we’re still living through today, six thousand years later. The exact same problems that exist when translating a direct experience to a speech sound exist when translating a direct experience to a 2-D surface, which is why “water” can look like this or like this.

 

[MittleGittle]

Does it sound like the sound a stone makes when it falls to the ground, the sound it makes when it hits another stone, the sound it makes when it’s rolled onto its side, or the sound it makes when it cuts into meat?

Thanks for your input.
The sound of a stone would be it hitting another one of itself, and a stone cutting meat would be the word for stone combined with the word for cutting meat, this combined with a cutting motion would make the word for “cutting meat with rock”

Humans wouldn’t be able to imitate the sounds exactly so they would simplify them. Writing would be a mix between hieroglyphs and logograms.

Don’t know how words like “the” and “it” would work.

 

[Arkenfolm]

I'd expect a language made from onomatopeia to have an insane amount of consonants including mixtures not seen in any natural language, like a ton of ejectives, clicks, and implosives, simply because there's a huge diversity of sounds in nature. There's also the problem that a lot of sounds can be heard the same.

Of course, there's plenty of examples from thousands of languages where the word for something are likely to be derived from onomatopeia (mostly birds but some insects and animals in general), but there's a huge variation within that. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's basically a spoken version of a pictogram. Language for more complex concepts would be like the equivalent of an ideogram.

Plus I don't think humans have good enough ears to reliably distinguish a lot of sounds from each other. This sounds more like it would be a cool base for a language for an alien species with extremely good hearing.

Don’t know how words like “the” and “it” would work.

Those evolve from words designating proximity to the speaker ("this" and "that"). As for pronouns, in your approach, it would be "whatever sound a human makes". Which seems a little circular.

 

[kasumigenx]

Irraya Tagarug
Official Language: Tagarug Kingdom(OTL Northern Luzon)
OTL Equivalent: Gaddang
Region: OTL Northern half of Luzon or Selurong
Family: Northern Luzon > Austronesian
Loan Words: Spanish and Portuguese
History:
Tarik Sulayman stops the Spanish from expanding to Northern Luzon and forms a new Kingdom.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Knaanic language:

Knaanic language - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

surving and thriving would be interesting. How would it look like if it remained dominant language of Jews living in Slavic lands? Unlike OTL there would not be significant language barrier between Eastern European Jews and their Slavic neighbors.

 

[Beacon]

Konkani would have developed a lot more if the Portuguese did not impose their own language on the Goans

 

[NorCalifornio]

Konkani would have developed a lot more if the Portuguese did not impose their own language on the Goans

What do you mean by "developed"?

 

[British Biscuit]

OK, I'll give it a shot:

Novoanglish
Official Language: recognized in the Kingdom of New England
Language Family: originally a Creole/Pidgin derived from combination of the Indo European Anglo-Saxon and the Turkic Cuman language; heavily influenced by East Slavic languages later on.
Writing Script: Latin/Old English Alphabet, Göktürk Script, Cyrillic
Loan Words: originally ~50% Old English & ~50% Cuman; over time the language took on more and more Slavic words & characteristics.

Language that developed in the Anglo-Saxon New England colony on the Black Sea. Originally developed as a trade language to communicate with the colony's surrounding Cuman neighbours, because the Anglo-Saxons settlers had low population numbers and had little contact with their "cousins" in England the language eventually became adopted by the upper classes & grew to became the lingua franca of the kingdom.

 

[Eparkhos]

Khiōkhoúdet

Official Language: Co-official language in the Demetriac Republic; spoken as a first language by 41% of the Demetriac population
Language Family: Indo-European > Hellenic > Judaeo-Hellenic > Khiokhoudet
Region: Demetriac Republic of Thessalonike and surrounding areas
Writing Script: Greek, Greco-Hebrew
Loan Words: ~40% taken from or derived from Demetriac Greek, ~40% taken from or derived from Hebrew, Yiddish, Sephardi, Qatalani, Ladino, Shuadit, Judaeo-Aragonese, Yevanic, Knaanic
History: From the late 13th into the mid 14th centuries, Jews were expelled from kingdoms and duchies across Europe. Many went to al-Andalus but here they were also turned away. With no where else to go over two dozen thousand Jews from all across the continent flooded into the city of Thessalonike. The city had been given a degree of autonomy and the privilege of electing her own governor by the emperor Alexios VI, and in the year 1299 said governor, Alexandros Konstaniades, invited the Jews to take up residence there in hopes of bolstering the trade and finance sections.

 

[Beacon]

What do you mean by "developed"?

Today Konkani uses a similar script as Marathi and many Marathi-speaking people say that it is a dialect of Marathi.

Maybe it would have its own script and more literature in Konkani/

 

[Igor MGTOW]

Language: Judeo-Slavic/ Hebrejski
Official Language: Judaic Kingdom of Kosovo
Language Family: Indo European -> Proto Balto Slavic -> Proto Slavic -> South Slavic -> Judeo-Slavic/Hebrejski
Region: Kosovo and surrounding Regions
Writing Script: Hebrew
Loan Words: 48% Hebrew
History
Jews from the balkan peninsula and migrate to kosovo in the 13th century and form a kingdom in the region of kosovo which lasted until the present day because the ruler bribed the ottomans into not annexing them it became completely independent in 19th century

 

[Igor MGTOW]

Language: Amazonian Confederado English
Official Language: None
Language Family Indo-European -> Germanic -> West Germanic -> Ingvaeonic -> Anglo-Frisian -> English -> Amazonian Confederado English
Region: Amazonian Rainforest
Writing Script: Latin
Loan Words: 20% portuguese
History
More people migrate from the confederate states into the amazonian rainforest region thus making several communities and towns deep in the amazon and also bring any newly freed slaves they can get their hands on after a while the slaves are freed but they are allowed to stay The Amazonian Confederado English is Discovered by Outsiders in 1970s and expeditions are sent to the amazon to meet and find the Amazonian Confederado Communities

 

[htgriffin]

Firstly, I have a soft spot for Karamanli Turkish remaining viable, perhaps by a different flavor of Turkish Nationalists leaning on the Orthodox population of Anatolia to "Embrace the Proud Heritage So Clearly Distinct From The Murderous Greeks" rather than engage in OTL's expulsions.

As for quasi-original? An old Pet Concept:

Language: Pannonian Mongol
Official Language: Kingdom & Khanate of Furthest Mongolia
Language Family: Mongolic -> Central Mongolic -> South Central Mongolic -> Oriat
Region: Central Europe, especially the Pannonian Basin
Writing Script: Latin
Loan Words: 5% Magyar, 10% Slavic, 7% (Recent) Turkic, 10% German, 10% Romance
History: The Hungarian Kingdom is wholly crushed, and a later Khan sent a number of tribes from the core Mongol plateau to settle there as a counterbalance to the increasingly dogmatic Muslim turkophones on the Pontic Steppe. They went native insofar as they assimilated into Latin Christiandom, but pride in thier language/bloodlines would not be extinguished.

 

[AltoRegnant]

Caroline Creole
Secondary Official Language of the Governorship of Caroline
Language Family: Romance-->French, with several Manding and Kongo loan-words
Region: What we would call the deep south of the US
Writing Script: Latin
Loan Words: 45% French, 40% Manding/Kongo, and about 15% various native languages, though this fluctuates greatly across the colony
History: France recruits Columbus and lands in Carolina, named Caroline for Charles VIII. originally little more than a dumping ground for criminals and supply station for the vessels to the real prizes in Mesoamerica, the colony eventually started importing slaves and growing cash crops after a meeting with a Portuguese soldier. Over time, a language evolved amongst the slaves utilized to communicate without the masters knowing. It soon spread to the lower free classes and became a significant minority language