I was thinking about very deep PoDs involving maybe alternate domestication events or completely different demographic histories of various regions, from Europe, Siberia to pre-Bantu Central and Southern Africa and also looking at the fact we are unable to really prove language families like Amerind, Altaic, Austric.
From this I came to the opinion that given the already likely present linguistic diversity we had in all those regions before various homogeneizing events(like the IE expansion, Turkic, Uralic, Bantu and so on),assuming plausible levels of linguistic change over long periods of times and also assuming that linguistic change is mostly random, one should in theory be able to derive an extremely vast array of different languages with completely different phonologies and grammar from any of the regions.
Now the problem is that at the same it is hard really hard to argue that any specific conlang can be plausible, for example can you somehow end up having a language exactly like Old Chinese starting from any of the unknown languages of Mesolithic Europe? We have no way to really tell but my instincts tell me no.
At the end of the day any specific conlang I or anyone can come up with is equivalent to Old Chinese in terms of plausibility and even trying to rely on substratum words in attested languages can hardly help you in understanding the extent of linguistic diversity or features millennia in the past.
Obviously we can still work with some peculiar areal features, like clicks in East and Southern Africa, words deriving from baby talk, using general attested chance to not create whacky phonologies of grammars, trying to fit your conlang with the closest attested language(for example basing WHG languages on Basque, Etruscan and Indo-European general patterns without either creating a mixed language or making it genetically related) to try and increase plausibility, but even then you are still working with languages attested millennia later, so maybe it doesn't even help?
What's your opinion? Is there even a non-subjective way to measure plausibility in this case?
From this I came to the opinion that given the already likely present linguistic diversity we had in all those regions before various homogeneizing events(like the IE expansion, Turkic, Uralic, Bantu and so on),assuming plausible levels of linguistic change over long periods of times and also assuming that linguistic change is mostly random, one should in theory be able to derive an extremely vast array of different languages with completely different phonologies and grammar from any of the regions.
Now the problem is that at the same it is hard really hard to argue that any specific conlang can be plausible, for example can you somehow end up having a language exactly like Old Chinese starting from any of the unknown languages of Mesolithic Europe? We have no way to really tell but my instincts tell me no.
At the end of the day any specific conlang I or anyone can come up with is equivalent to Old Chinese in terms of plausibility and even trying to rely on substratum words in attested languages can hardly help you in understanding the extent of linguistic diversity or features millennia in the past.
Obviously we can still work with some peculiar areal features, like clicks in East and Southern Africa, words deriving from baby talk, using general attested chance to not create whacky phonologies of grammars, trying to fit your conlang with the closest attested language(for example basing WHG languages on Basque, Etruscan and Indo-European general patterns without either creating a mixed language or making it genetically related) to try and increase plausibility, but even then you are still working with languages attested millennia later, so maybe it doesn't even help?
What's your opinion? Is there even a non-subjective way to measure plausibility in this case?
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