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--- In romanceconlang@y..., "Mat McVeagh" <matmcv@h...> wrote: > I hadn't thought before that it might be a *revived* CL rather than one > carrying on from ancient Rome. If you are prepared to at least start it on > Earth it could be as follows: towards the end of the Roman empire, a party > of patrician Romans who could still speak Classical Latin escaped from the > collapsing empire to a place of relative safety - I would suggest North > Africa. There they found a new colony, which maintains the classical form of > the language as a riposte to the triumph of the common form of the language > in the old empire. Yeah, I've had such thoughts too... in my earliest versions, I had some elitist grouping of Romans (Something like a sect perhaps? The children of Jupiter? That would at least explain the name...) founding a colony somewhere off the wars and invasions in Europe. However, I'd have to drop the German substrate completely... or maybe adopt something else as a substrate, but I'm afraid I'm not familiar with any language that was spoken at that time. =( Of course, I could include the Germanic substrate in the form of a load of Germanic slaves carried along as workers... but surely the Germanic languages 2000 years ago were totally different from the German I know... =( As for Northern Africa, well, it would be a possibility, I guess, but it would introduce yet another substratum of pre-existing culture with which I have even less experience... > I don't know how it gets to Jupiter tho... maybe if you continue that colony > as a surviving country in Ill Bethisad, and eventually it joins in space > exploration. It doesn't need to get to Jupiter. My planned sci-fi universe that would contain Jovia has never been developed past the conceptual idea stage, so I could well transplant the language along with its culture into another universe. -- Christian Thalmann