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Hi!
"Peter Collier" <petecollier@hidden.email> writes:
> 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 !).
Ok, I wont mention my Thrjotran. :-)
Why not, it's lovely.
Anyway, you seem wanting to go in a different direction, something
more similar to German maybe, not Icelandic, I presume. Also, by your
questions, you seem wanting to create something that does not try to
strictly direct Latin into some Germanic lang that is spoken today,
but instead create something different that has the *feel* of being
Germanic, but not strictly like an existing natlang. Am I guessing
right? E.g. the questions of orthography was clear for Thrjotran: it
uses exactly the Icelandic system, and even earlier stages (Old
Thrjotran) uses the (modern) Old Icelandic system.
I'm quite interested in your goals actually!
So am I, because I'm not sure! If I were a scupltor, I think I'd be one of those infuriating types who just keep chiseling away at a big lump of rock intuitively, until something nice "emerges". I think I'm more interested in the process than the end product. However, my basic premises are:
Its a language that would be spoken in the current High/Middle German area - i.e. Switzerland, Baden-Wuerttemburg, Bavaria and Austria (plus those few areas in Northern Italy and Slovenia). That would leave the rest of Northern Germany *there* with Low German/Low Saxon as its standard language, unaffected by the high german sound shift as it was *here.* - Presumably, con-politically, you have state called "Saxony" or "Prussia" in the north, speaking something that looked *almost* dutch, and a separate austro-bavarian state in the south with my langauage, probably under the benign constitutional rule of Dr. Otto von Hapsburg (well, being an MEP seems such a step down from his grandfather's imperial glory, doesn't it?) - but this is a linguistic exercise, not alternative history.
The language will be German-like, because I like German and, as I can speak it I have a feel for where I need to go as I'm working things out, which helps. But it will be a Romance language, not a Germanic one - romance grammar, syntax and so on. Something that might have come to be if the Romans had got as far as Thuringia for any length of time, and you ended up with the local Germanic tribes adopting latin as their language, with some funny weird West-Germanic accent. Ultimately that "northern romance" develops into whatever I end up crafting.
It can't really be a Western Romance langauge, because they all developed from VL, which lost its vowel length distinction - something I need to keep initially as it played an important role in the development of German *here*. Eastern romance is out (non parlo italiano), so that leaves the pretend 'north' - but at least that gives me a freer hand. The big question will be orthography, I want something Germanic looking (I need it really too, to fit the sound system), but why would a roman language have it, particularly when they seem to be orthographically consevative?
Another thought - WGmc/OHG had a lot more diphthongs than latin, but latin had many polysyllabic vowel clusters. Do you think it is likely having someone speak 'latin' with a WGmc accent would result in some of those vowel clusters turning into true diphthongs. The most obvious commonplace example is <iu>, which was /i.u/ in latin but /iu/ in germanic. If I had a few more of the OHG diphthongs to play with things could get very interesting!
>...
> 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/ ?
>...
_h_ ?
I wondered about <h>. It's tempting. /h/ is close to /x/, it was silent in later latin, so not needed for another phoneme and it was often used to form affricate/fricative digraphs. A distinct possibility. For all its logic, I don't like <ch> as /x/. Being English I just can't think past /tS/, it's so ingrained!
**Henrik
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