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At 05:39 06/11/2003, habarakhe4 wrote:
--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, Carl Edlund Anderson <cea@c...> wrote: > Can anyone recommend some good resources (online or printed) for > Archaic/Old Latin (or other archaic forms of Italic? I'm doing > a little bit of conlang work (a conlanglet?) in which I > essentially want to make an "alternate Latin" (and I'll > eventually get on to tying "alternate Romance" descendents to it > :) What sort of alternate Latin were you contemplating?
It's really for a little "alternate world" project that I have -- not actually set in historical Italy or anywhere on this Earth -- but I like Indo-European languages too well to give them up, so I thought I would just play with them a little in my new world (because that would be fun).
The primary guideline in my "alternate Latin" is I'm trying to exclude Hellenic influences (mostly because I decided long ago that I didn't know enough Greek to play with it, but now also because I've come to realize the quantity of Greek in historical Latin _really_ forces me to _work_ in order to avoid it! :) I suppose I could try to reconstruct Greek words back through PIE and then down into Italic again, but I'd need to know rather more about all the sounds changes than I yet do. I also figured borrowing some more features from other Italic languages would be interesting, and so far I'm happy to keep non-IE borrowings in my alternate Latin (Etruscan, Semitic, what-have-you -- though I haven't though much about the place of "alternate Semitic" in my hypothetical world). I also wanted to retain some interesting Archaic/Old Latin features (the older diphongs, for example), and change the orthography so it all looked a bit more alien (and, ironically, a bit more "Greek-like" ;)
I had planned at least one "modern" descendant of my alternate Latin, modelled on the kinds of changes that produced Catalan (though of course my version wouldn't have all the Greek borrowings and such that Catalan inherited :)
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@hidden.emailhttp://www.carlaz.com/