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--- Christian Thalmann skrzypszy: > > 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...) I personally find that a very good idea. Well, you can have it both ways. Let's say a group of Classical Latin-speaking patricians had to escape Rome because they refused to embrace Christianity? > 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. =( No no no!! I remember you first posting ever about Jovian, before the language even had a name. I immediately "felt" the Germanic substrate (tho I think I called it Gothic), without you even mentioning it! > 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... =( Well, Gothic is well-documented and far from ugly! And the Goths have another advantage: they spread over all Europe, from the Iberian peninsula to the Crimea, and met a lot of Romans along the way :) So, if you want to justify Jovian's Germanic substratum, you could theorize about a place where those Goths (or other Germans) adopted Classical Latin for some reason as their language of communication; or you can assume a Germanic superstratum, in the form of those Roman patricians who believed in Jupiter, and escaped to a place controlled by Goths... > 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... ... and it would definitely get you in trouble with Moors, Arabs, etc. BTW There are some "Afro-Romance" conlangs in circulation: - Carthagenian (check RomanceConlang's archives), - Afar (only one sentence in Conlang's archives), and - Christophe's yet-unnamed Arabo-Romance language (did you realize this language after all, Christophe?). Jan ===== "Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com