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While I remain a little light-heartedly embarrassed about bringing up Brithenig only to find that it was already well known, I pride myself in the ability to laugh at myself, so LOL to me! >>Another stumbling block is that the history of Old English is exceedingly complicated<< Call me lazy, but would anyone here be willing to give me an overview of the history of Old English? As soon as I master Latin (I'm down to the last five chapters in my primer), I am going to tackle the Anglo-Romance project and see what I can come up with. I love the idea. Another conlanging project I may soon undertake and one that could be interpreted as a somewhat different take on the basic Anglo- Romance issue is a conlang designed to be the language of the United States in the somewhat-distant future. It is based on the premise that the growing Hispanic influence on American culture will eventually permeate the language and the U.S. will develop an Anglo- Castilian language uniquely its own (not to be confused with the very unofficial, highly undeveloped, and rudimentary Spanglish of current usage). This may not be the most realistic premise given the overall fortitude of English in America and in the world, but it can't hurt to dream. Not all conlangs have to be based on realistic premises, though I am certainly not bashing those that are (on the contrary, conlangs based on plausible premises are sometimes the best ones). Wish me luck as I continue mastering Latin! It is the most complicated langauge I've ever undertaken to learn (five noun declensions, three adjective declensions, three genders, distinct passive voice tenses, and four stems for each verb! Geez!), but I love the economy of this ancient language as well as its classical and even mythical aura. My primer says that the Romans used no punctuation and sometimes left no spaces between words. So one of my favorite things to do with the Latin I've learned so far is to type a sentence or paragraph with no macrons, no spaces between words, and no punctuation except for periods between sentences and proper capitalization. I then put the text in a medieval-manuscript-style font called Bastarda and voila, I have a rather authentic-looking peice of seemingly ancient writing. Sorry that I got a little off-the-wall, but I can't help my love for Romance languages and Romance linguistics. That is, after all, a large part of why I joined this group. Disco latinum ad creandum linguas. Had to practice a little on you!