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All this has re-awakened an old dormant project bubbling away in the back of my brain. What if Latin hadn't risen as the language of the Roman Empire, and Greek had been the status-lect and the ordinary-lect up until the end of Latin-as-a-living-language? How would the Romance languages have turned out, assuming similar phonetic and semantic drift took place as "here"? I don't have a Classical Greek lexicon to hand, nor a comprehensive treatment of the sound changes, otherwise I'd rustle up a few examples. Any takers?
This is often brought up but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually carry it out. I tried running Spanish and French but apparently I never got past the first couple of words.
The lexical stress of the κοινή kind of complicates the Romance sound changes we know (unless you care to impose Latinate stress patterns...)
Trying to keep the kind of lexical variation across Romance languages...
sg pl
the: m τον τες
f τεν τες
and: (fr-el) και [se]
(es-el) θαι [Te]
word: (fr-el) τον γρύ, τεν παραυλέ [tO~"gri, tE~p@ro"le]
(es-el) τεν παλαβρέ [tempala"Bre]
That's about all I had. I think I stumbled across the creeping horrors
that are the Greek verbal conjugations and ran away screaming.
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