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On 25-Feb-2005 04:45, gregbontrager wrote:
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.
What kind of Anglo-Romance are you thinking of? If Brithenig is Latin through Brittonic>Welsh sound changes, are you thinking of putting Latin through Germanic>OE sound changes? I guess Alistair Campbell's _Old English Grammar_ is still the basic entry point for OE sound changes, though it's kind of old these days. Anyone have other good recommendations?
Or are you thinking of West Germanic vocabulary put through Romance sound changes? I've got a slowly simmering project to put Proto-Celtic (or some kind of hypothetical Gallo-Celtiberian) through Spanish sound changes. I was thinking of doing the same thing with Gothic, but haven't even started on that! I reckon these as primarily Romance conlangs, even though the use non-Romance vocabulary, since they use Romance sound changes (and I find understanding the sound changes much harder than just grabbing some vocabulary from somewhere).
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).
Strangely enough, I have occasionally been thinking about something similar of late -- mostly along the lines of hypothetical grammatical and vocabulary changes to Spanish brought on by contact with English-speakers. Clearly, there is already a strong influence of English vocabulary on real American Spanish, but being myself a gringo dumped into a heavily Hispanic environment :) I keep thinking about an imagainary Anglo-Hispanic speech community that would formalize the kind of changes and mistakes that I make in Spanish :)
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/