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On 25-Feb-2005 14:28, Clockwork Angel wrote:
From: Carl Edlund Anderson <cea@hidden.email>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 did that as a sketch to see how it turned out. I took classical Latin phonemes, kept "h" as /x/ and then went through a series of Germanic shifts:Grimm's Law (ptk > fTx, bdg > ptk, etc.)Verner's Law (regarding the exceptions of Grim's in certain stress situations)Shift of stress to the first syllable of the word the Great English Vowel Shift i-umlautand a few others that I don't recall off the top of my head. I basically went through my history of English books and selected what seemed to be the largest changes going from PIE to Germanic to Old English to Middle English. I didn't go further forward than that (i.e. no Middle to Modern changes).
Ah, if I was working with classical Latin vocab, I might skip the PIE>PGmc changes (Grimm and such) and just take the changes from PGmc onward.
The most interesting thing I noticed right away is that, of course, Germanic doesn't have any problems holding on to final consonants (although final m/n did disappear in Old > Middle English), and that combined with the i-umlaut effect means that a good majority of nouns retain some manner of case distinction, especially in the plural, and that irregular verbs skyrocket due to the i-umlaut on -ere verbs. Of course, this might later iron out due to analogy, but I didn't pursue it that far.
Yeah, to get a more "simplified Romance" feel from this Germanicized Latin one might want to go on to look at the collapses of the case systems from OE > MidE and Old Norse > modern Scandinavian. In the case of OE > MidE, I believe the main processes were the reduction of unstressed final vowels to /e/ and (their eventual disappearance) and the merger of final /m/ with final /n/. I'm embarrassed to admit I don't remember what was up in Scandinavian, but perhaps it was something similar ....
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/