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Henrik Theiling skrev:
Hi!
S�ll!
I think mainly it's the amount of information that is a bit confusing. It looks well-organised, however, and if it *is* much there is to say, then, well, it cannot be reduced, of course.
Right, and I'm definitely a tabular person: there *can* and will be a prose description, but *I* have to have a table to work from when doing the prose description.
Maybe when explaining some interesting detail with references to the tables, it would a nice introduction.
It is coming: I'm working on it in the form of notes to the tables ATM.
Anyway, I did not present my own tables in any readable form, so I am actually the wrong person to ask for improvements here. K�rar �akkir! :-)That's an interesting excerpt. What's the book title? I'm sure it is hard to obtain, right? So far, any book I needed for this project turned out to be hard to obtain. Fortunately, there is a lot of online stuff.
It is "An introduction to Vulgar Latin" by Grandgent. A search for Title: "vulgar latin" Author: "grandgent" on bookfinder.com should do the trick. It is from 1907 but there are reprints, even new ones. The scholarship is a bit dated at some points, but it is very good for a general overview, and for conlanging. It has long lists of productive VL suffixes among other things.
BTW, I got my Meyer L�bke (1st print run). However, it is water-damaged a bit (ironically, it's from Amsterdam...:-))), but it's perfectly readable and I am going to have a bookbinder make a new cover for it. The publisher told me they are going to reissue itagain next year, and I will probably get a new one then.
Do you know if they are �going to republish the backward index too?
Well, why not, there're a lot of areas the Institute of Parallel Histories have not reported about yet. :-)My friend who does the conhistory in this project is currently busy drawing language maps showing the overall distribution of language families. I will show you as soon as he thinks they can be published.
OK.
Will it be a Northern Romance lang?
No, apart from vowel umlaut it is a rather run-of-the-mill Western Romance lang, I'm afraid.
I saw you write /S/ as {sch}, which looks vaguely familiar to me. :-)
No |sch| writes /sk/ before |i/e/y|. There arose a lot of cases of that due to umlaut, since there was no (distinctive) palatalization before secondary front vowels. I.e. |ch| and |gh| are used as in Italian (and medieval Picard!). Conversely /S/ is written |sc(e/i)|, in late texts |s�| before |a/o/u| and finally. Early texts have a number of kludges for final /S/, including |is| and |sz| -- the latter is not directly inspired by Polish, but by the fact that final |z| writes /ts/.
What are the overall design goals for that language?
A mix of my favorite parts of Western Romance, plus umlaut as a twist, and a slightly twisted orthography, |(t)x| for /tS/ probably being the most twisted. Part of the idea is to get a phonology similar to Old French, but by another route.
Is the GMP inspired by Germanic?
Not apart from its having umlaut and final devoicing. However none of those is unknown in Romance *here* (especially not final devoicing, IIANM) -- I only took unlaut a couple of steps farther.
In that case, I think it would be classified as Northern Romance *there*.
So I think it wouldn't, but perhaps umlaut is more widespread as an areal feature *there*?
**Henrik
/Bendex de Ioan
--
/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)