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Kinetic skrev: > OK, I'd thought I wasn't especially interested in > romlangs, but what with stuff like Wenedyk and �rj�trunn > and now this, I appear to have been bitten. :-) So, which > book(s) would people recommend for me to read up on all > that fascinating diachronic sound-change gubbins? "The Romance languages" by W.D. Elcock. "The French language" by Alfred Ewert They are both of the "The Great Languages" series published by Faber and Faber, London. There are many editions. Ewert is valuable in that it treats one of the most 'advanced' Romance varieties at some depth. Charles H. Grandgent, "An Introduction to Vulgar Latin" (Heath & Co., 1907) There are reprints. There is also a Spanish translation that may be easier to come by if you read Spanish: Charles H. Grandgent, "Introducci�n al latin vulgar / C.H. Grandgent ; traducci�n y anotaci�n por Francisco de B. Moll Grandgent's phonology is suspect in spots, but his treatment of derivation is invaluable. In general all of these are valuable in that they take up details of phonology and morphology that are only brushed over in more recent introductions. Check also the Wikipedia Article on Vulgar Latin, and the books mentioned there. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin> While most of them can be found on Amazon <bookfinder.com> is generally your best friend. As Henrik said a good Latin dictionary (including Eng-Lat) is necessary. but bear in mind that Vulgar Latin had spades of words not found in Classical Latin, and vice versa. Meyer-L�bke's dictionary is invaluable but expensive and hard to come by. You can find copies at bookfinder, though. I had the luck to inherit it! :-) A very good site is <http://www.wordreference.com/> which is an online Eng-Fra-Ita-Spa dictionary with automatic linkage between the languages. A very good complement or even replacement to Meyer-L�bke in lieu of a German or English index to the latter. M-L has an index from the modern languages to Proto-Romance, but you have to know the modern words first. Also sadly you need a somewhat ancient/special German-English dictionary to crack the glosses sometimes. My grandmother's 100 y.o. German-Swedish dictionary often serves me well! Make sure to subscribe to Romconlang <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/romconlang/>. I have CC-ed and we really should take the discussion there or to Conlang since the Relay list frowns on OT posts. Some of us have M-L and can look up words for you, if you got their modern descendants. (Not a lot of words at a time of course...) Once you get a feel for the sound changes you can actually figure out the ancestral form from the modern forms. That you can't distinguish certain Latin vowel pairs (I -- e:, U -- o:, a -- a:) is really no big deal, since all the Romance languages have them merged ever since Vulgar Latin. The exception is that Balkan Romance (Rumanian and its closest relatives) and a South Italian area merge /U/ with /u:/ instead.) /BP