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Deiniol Jones wrote:
Personally, I think Archaic Latin is so much cooler than Classical Latin. Off the top of my head, some features of AL vs. CL which might interest you for Qurese: most diphthongs are retained, so "oinouersei" rather than "uniuersi", c.f. also the Carmina of the Salii
Yes, I was looking to retain diphthongs where I can -- gives things an oddly "Hellenic" feel that I think is kinda fun. I had noted down "oinos" instead of "unus", for example, though I always worry about missing an original dipthong when trying to "cast back" a word and putting an /i:/ where I ought to have an /ei/. But I suppose folks here will help me spot errors like that.
many atonic vowels are dropped (and then restored in CL, VL didn't bother), e.g. "oclus" instead of "oculus" (see the dialogues in Plautus)
Now that's interesting; I hadn't heard about that before. I would have assumed PIE /okwolos/ or something like that was carried straight through (barring /kw/ > /k/) to Latin "oculus" and the vowel was dropped only in VL. I wonder if this is a case of some archaic feature being maintained in popular speech, rather than a "re-dropping" of atonic vowels in VL? I recall Penny's book on Spanish suggesting such thing might occur, like perhaps the Proto-Italic fem.nom.pl. ending -as being continued in popular speech while CL installed -ae?
PIE *dw- hadn't yet become b-, so "Duellona" for "Bellona" and "duene" for "bene".
Yup, I had noted some of those, though I couldn't find a _lot_ of examples of intial /dw-/
AC still had -Vd as the ablative singular inflection, rather than -V:
Noted that :) Though I figured I would still lose final -d in the "vulgar" stage, giving for example in the a-stems an abl.sing -ad > -a ending that helps me lose extra declensions then, too.
no rhotacism of medial -s-
Yeah, I've been wrestling with this, again mostly since I'm not always sure I'll catch where a medial -s- has gone to -r-! It would be nice to include :)
final *-t became -d, so "feced" instead of "fecit" (the t was later restored by analogy) short vowels in medial open syllables were not raised to i/u
Hadn't cottoned on to those yet! I'll have to watch out for examples.
BTW, whence "Qurese"?
In short, and smoosh-together of "Cures" and "quiris".The longer explanation is -- well my conlanging projects exist to support a fiction writing project that is not set in the Real World, but I want to steal IE languages because a) I know them, more or less, and b) they look and feel familiar. Kinda like Tolkien used an OE dialect in his fiction, or Harry Turtledove used Byzantine Greek. Anyway, the culture of my speakers of Qurese is centered on a city-state named Qures (orthographtically, I've been using "q" for /kw/, so "qur-" means /kwur-/. I basically stole the name from the historical Sabine town of Cures with further influence from the name of the Romano-Oscan god Quirinus (some probably out-of-date) theories have seen the names of both town and god both these forms as stemming somehow from Sabine curis/quiris ("spear"). IIRC, Oscan normally has /p/ for Latin /kw/, so I suspect the /kw/ implied by Latin "quiris" is unetymological (curis/quiris perhaps ultimately from PIE *ker-?) and probably is just a /k/ really, I suppose .... But "Qures" looks much cooler :) than "Kures" and, in my situation, I like to keep the form "Qures" visually distinct from a more modern "Neo-Qurese" descendant form like "Kores". So I've opted to stick with a place-name "Qures" assocaited with a deity named "Qurenus".
I suppose the native name for "Qurese" should be something like "dingwa Qurensis" or "dingwa Qurena" or something like that.
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/