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The Wikipedia article on Artistic languages says in its current version

What if Greek civilization had gone on to thrive without a Roman Empire, leaving Greek and not Latin to develop several modern descendants?

But in the ongoing text no Greek based altlangs are mentioned.

What are examples of Greek based altlangs?

2 Answers 2

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  • TAKE is Το Ἄνευ Κλίσι Ἑλληνική / Greek Without Inflexions. According to Ray Brown, "Graeca sine flexione" ... (considers) what Greek might be like if stripped of its inflexions in the manner similar to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione... It should be pointed out that although Giuseppe Peano produced 'Latino sine flexione' as an international auxiliary language, I am NOT making a similar proposal for ΤΑΚΕ!

  • Outidic is a kind of IAL for the learned, statesmen & merchants alike.

    These are both by Ray Brown of Conlang-L.

  • Èskova Linga

  • Engadinese is a Greek-Romansch graftlang.

  • Atlo Greek appears now to be entirely lost.

  • Rhaetian

There may be others...

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  • Pity the TAKE site seems to be down; but if TAKE was inspired by Latino Sine Flexione, it'd have been an auxlang, not an altlang... Mar 22, 2018 at 6:15
  • 1
    Ah, turns out it's a fictional counterpart to Latino sine Flexione, so it's an artlang auxlang. Apr 9, 2018 at 10:12
  • @NickNicholas It's from an alternate history in which Peano worked from Greek? Nov 3, 2018 at 22:17
  • @NickNicholas -- Definitely NOT an auxlang!
    – elemtilas
    Nov 4, 2018 at 0:23
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After a bit of searching, the only remotely Greek-based altlang I've found is Eressilian, which is mentioned only in the above Reddit post. It claims to be the result of the evolution of the Hittite language, after mixing with other languages in the region surrounding Asia Minor. These languages (notably Persian, Arabic, and Greek) mainly contributed loanwords, which were then modified and incorporated. Unfortunately, little information is given, and there's no substantial vocabulary list. The only supposedly "Greek" word given is adelphotés, which - matching sentences word for word - seems to have been turned into elelpulush. I haven't been able to determine its meaning or origin.

Some notes on Eressilian:

  • The Hittite language was an Anatolian language, which may or may not be "daughter languages" in the Indo-European family. A competing hypothesis is that it is instead a sister language family, developing separately, rather than a branch.
  • The modern Greek language is a Hellenic language, definitely Indo-European; Persian is also Indo-European, an Indo-Iranian language. Arabic, on the other hand, is an Afroasiatic language, not Indo-European. This means that there any purely Hellenic influence will be reduced.
  • Eressilian's notable loss of grammatical gender is likely a Persian influence, not Greek.

In short, Greek influence on Eressilian is largely only through loanwords, and is not shown in grammatical structures. It's there, but it's minor.

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