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Hib Peter Collier wrote: > > Ok, I wont mention my Thrjotran. :-) > > Why not, it's lovely. Thanks! :-) More work to come. I'm currently fininshing the extensions to the lexican data base to be able to store inflection forms, and then I hope to be able to make some texts. Stay tuned! :-) >... > 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? I see the difference to my approach, yes, which is quite goal-based. In your case, all of orthography, syntax, and morphology will be unique since you will probably watch your language evolve, while I knew in advance what the goal will be. (But I did not know the way and not the *precise* result, so this was what made it interesting for me). So the orthography question is much more interesting in your lang. I'm curious of what you will come up with. BTW, Sardinian is based more on the Classical Latin sound system, so a Sardinian dictionary might be helpful for inspiration. I used that for Thrjotran, too, because it fits the Germanic system much better, so I expected more realistic results. Plus, Sardinian retains many words lost in other Romance langs, and I wanted my lang to be conservative, too. Here's an URL: http://www.ditzionariu.org/home.asp?lang=sar > 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! I did that in Thrjotran. Stress, and as a side effect hiatus between vowels, is adjusted immediately to the Germanic system. This is to make the sound changes work more easily. Hiatus is seldom in North Germanic, but occurred with some sound changes during history (obviously when consonants dropped), but the result is often unstable: many Icelandic worlds have two forms because different strategies were obviously used to handle hiatus and sometimes both survived -- hiatus was obviously an uncommon phenomenon to the speakers and they did not really have a commonsense of how to handle it. So you do change the vowels considerably but introducing diphthongs, I think, but Germanic sound changes just apply badly if you don't cope with them. BTW, I also introduces long vowels for V.V sequences, e.g. suus > *su:s > sy:r. > _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. ... And it is used to write /x/ in e.g. Proto-Germanic words. > For all its logic, I don't like <ch> as /x/. Being > English I just can't think past /tS/, it's so ingrained! HAHA! And I'd *never* use _y_ to represent /j/, since I'm German. **Henrik