[Discussion] With Neolithic-Mesolithic PODs, can pure conlanging create plausible alt-languages?

[Gloss]

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?

 

[Glory2Cabinda]

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?

Everything older then 10k years is fair game

 

[Gloss]

Everything older then 10k years is fair game

Why this date specifically? Also what would make something less or more plausible(can be arbitrary reasons)?

 

[Gloss]

@Salvador79 You wrote a timeline about copper age Europe with some conlanging, what's your perspective on the matter?

 

[Glory2Cabinda]

Why this date specifically? Also what would make something less or more plausible(can be arbitrary reasons)?

Its generally considered the limit of historical linguistics

 

[Salvador79]

@Salvador79 You wrote a timeline about copper age Europe with some conlanging, what's your perspective on the matter?

Well, as always, I suppose the answer is: It depends.
Developing a valid theoretical model of how to assess the plausibility of Neolithic or even Mesolithic conlangs is a very difficult, most likely frustrating, possibly futile task.
But it depends on what you want to do.
In the case of my Holy Mountain TL, I went for marginal recognisability, and so I stretched plausibility a lot, but on the other hand, I deemed it still better than coming up with something completely out of thin air. I had a culture of agricultural pioneers who had gone from Anatolia to the Danube, and so I chose the only language we (a very small) something of which is from Anatolia and neither Indo-European, nor belonging to any of the Mesopotamian language groups: Hattic. I went with the few vocabulary we know, and then tried to apply plausible substratum effects of Eastern Old European languages of which we have at least some vague ideas - from the shift from PIE to Proto-Germanic on the one hand, since Proto-Germanic speakers were in close contact with Danubian speakers of Old European languages, and from unique non-IE substratum in Greek. Both substratum effects on the phonological level point in different directions, but they have an overlap: there is a penchant for "x", "sh", "ts" sounds, for example. So I used a lot of these in my conlang, too. And I never wrote a whole conlang Tolkien-style. But this is certainly very much on the margins. I would not cal it a plausible approximation of Danubian Copper Age languages - it was meant to be better than completely-made-up, just that.

But this TL by a member who is now banned (Bassarion Korax) really goes deep and much more systematically than I ever did into Neolithic conlanging, this time based on PIE. Basically, conlanging primarily involves a good grasp of linguistics and a way to weave your conlang into the narrative (especially its cultural dimensions) that you tell. Good knowledge of reconstructed pre-historic languages helps other people recognise what you did. But it's still a long shot from scientific plausibility.