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I'm having a play, creating some sort of "Northern Romance" branch using the Germanic sound changes on Latin, and tweaking it a bit in different ways (yes, I know it's been done before, but not by *me* - and i'm enjoying it !).
Yes it *is* fun. I've just been thinking about what Greek from about the beginning of the CE -- more or less the stage of Greek phonology reflected in the standard Latin transcription of Greek -- would look like if subjected to the sound changes of Old English (and then Middle and New English...)
I'm still just sorting out the phonology into some kind of "master plan" before I start looking into the grammar, but the emerging phonology has had me thinking about the orthography I'm going to eventually need so people can get their pens around my linguistic meddling. I've run a few nouns through the mill to see what comes out, and then transcribed the phonetics as best as possible using something like standard German orthography (which seems suitable enough for now, although the results look a little odd). Thing is, I can't imagine how best to transcribe a word- initial velar fricative (other than the Swiss <kch_>, which just looks too non-roman) - and I have plenty of them. In other positions I used <ch>, which seems fine to me (not too far away for example fom the French <ch> for /S/). I've thought of maybe <c>, or <c-cedilla>, or even <hch> (c.f. German <sch> and <tsch>), but they don't quite seem to fit. Maybe just use <ch> in initial position too, althouh that looks 'wrong' to me. Does anyone have any idea how those poor mediaeval monks, schooled in classical latin, might have tried to write an initial /x/ ?
Obviously as _ch-_. That's what they used in Old and Middle High German when writing in those dialects that had initial /x/, so they would write _chuo_ for 'cow' -- the modern final _-h_ in _Kuh_ being merely an orthographic device introduced by analogy. Why wouldn't that fit? Do you use initial _ch-_ for soemthing else? Do you perhaps mean an initial velar *affricate*, i.e. /kx/ as opposed to,and distinct from, the fricative /x/, which is what _kch_ denotes in Swiss German? I agree that _kch-_ seems suboptimal! However you are not the only one to think so: IIRC some Swiss use _kh_ for /kx/ against _ch_ for /x/ (which would seem to be more economical as well). Just the other day I read about the orthographic practices of the earliest Old English manuscripts, before they had settled down on the Old English orthography we are familiar with -- which was obviously devised by someone with both enough influence and less reverence for Latin and more phonological intuition than his predecessors[1]. There the [x] (and [C]?) allophone of /h/ was denoted by _ch_ (/ht/ even as _ct_), and medial long /hh/ (phonetically [x:]) -- as in the word later spelt _lihhian_ 'laugh' -- by _- chch-_ or a variety of compromises/permutations of it including _- cch-, -hch-_ and even _-cc-_, while the later _-hh-_ seems to have been absent in those early manuscripts. So _hch_ is attested for [x] in Germanic languages, though only medially, and I must confess i find it rather ugly even there! IIRC _hh_ was used for medial /x/ in Old High German as well. I don't know if they maintained any distinction between old /hh/ and /x/ derived from the High German consonant shift, though I don't think they did; as far as I understand to those scribes _ch_ was [kx] in all positions, while medial /x/ was _hh_, medial /h/ _h_ and final /x/ _-h_. NB /h/ didn't occur finally. This seems to me a rather elegant way of handling these sounds.
And then that led me to wondering to what extent the romance languages' orthographies tend towards being conservative, (in preserving the original latin to some extent or another). Pronununciation in Castillian has moved quite some way from latin, but the orthography is much more 'latin-conservative' than say, Italian, which while perhaps phonologically closer to latin, has changed it's spelling a lot (e.g. Castillian <qu�> vs italian <che>). What are your thoughts? Stamp your mark on the nascent Northern Romance languages! Should they be more latin looking, or more germanic!?
Yes, most Romance orthographies are rather conservatively
Latinizing -- even more so from the Renaissance onwards than
in Medieval times. They tend to stick to the basic Latin
alphabet plus the digraphs _ch, ph, th, qu, gu_ used already
in Latin. While allographic variants like _j, v, �_ seem to
have been OK to some degree wholly new letters were not --
cf. how even English eventually gave up on _�_, and how _�_
which was originally an allograph of _z_ was modified into a
_c_ with a diacritic (see <http://wiki.frath.net/Cedilla>).
In medieval times _k_ was actually in much more common use.
AFAIK in Romance languages _k_ was always used for /k/, but
in Old English it was an indiscriminate though infrequent
alternative to _c_, and thus could stand also for /tS/!
In Romance Medieval usage _ch_ could stand for both /k/
and /tS/ -- even in the same text it seems --, and _gh_
was analogically introduced -- mostly it seems for /g/
before 'soft' vowels, as _ch, gh_ are still used in Italian.
In Spain they also used _gg_ for both /tS/ and /dZ/.
Perhaps you could use that beautiful _quh_, which Scots
used for /hw/, to write /kx/!
I've had similar problems when trying to imagine how Old English
orthography might have evolved if it had *not* been influenced
by Norman French spelling. In Old English _c, g_ were used for
both for 'soft' /tS/, /j/ and for 'hard' /k/, /g/. Sometimes
an _e_ or _i_ was inserted to show that the consonant was 'soft'
before a hard vowel, but there was no way to indicate a 'hard'
consonant before a 'soft' vowel. My favorite assumption is that
_ch, gh_ came into use for this, like in Italian, but this left
me without a good graphy for /x/. Mostly I've assumed that they
went on using _h_ for /x/, but sometimes I've used _k_ for /x/!
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
"Maybe" is a strange word. When mum or dad says it
it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
means "no"!
(Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)