[YG Conlang Archives] > [romconlang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: [romconlang] Re: [relay] OT: Romconlanging



On 25/01/2007 13:08, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
As Henrik said a good Latin dictionary (including Eng-Lat)
is necessary.

For online convenience, you can get a long way with the Perseus Project's searchable Lewis & Short: <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi- bin/resolveform?lang=Latin> It's sometimes down when they're maintaining their databases, but usually comes back after a while. It let's you search form in the English definitions, too, making it effectively Latin <-> English.

Meyer-Lübke'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! :-)

Abebooks.co.uk currently lists copies going for between roughly GBP 30 and GBP 150! I found one for about the lower end of that scale a year or so ago. 30 quid for a massive academic tome doesn't seem so bad to me (though I'm benefiting from the relative strength of the pound at the moment on this!).

I may be one of the few (?) people interested in Romance conlanging who hasn't worked around standard French that much -- I fear my knowledge scarcely extends past ordering dinner, and my library only hold a couple of battered phrasebooks! The closest I come is William Paden's _An Introduction to Old Occitan_, which crams a lot of info on linguistic background and learning to read texts into one package; it's section on phonological developments is pretty handy conlanging stuff.

I've worked a bit more with Ibero-Romance and would recommend Ralph Penny's _A History of the Spanish Language_. It's got very usable info on phonology and morphology (enough to have served me as a very breezy intro to Proto-Romance).

I done much with Italo-Romance, but have a copy of Martin Maiden's _A Linguistic History of Italian_, and that looks like a lot of good stuff.

For post-Latin Romance in general, Boyd-Bowman's _From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts_ provides a nice overview. R.A. Hall's _Proto-Romance Phonology_ and _Proto-Romance Morphology_ are very cool, but are also quite pricey; might be worth snagging them from a university library, if you can, and giving them the ol' photocopy/ scanner treatment! It's fair use .... :)

I've become increasingly enamored with the idea of reworking a whole alternate Romance family for myself, starting out with a somewhat mutated Proto-Italic, stealing some stuff from Old Latin and related things like Oscan, and then grinding forward through an alternative Proto-Romance into some daughter languages roughly modeled on the historical Romance languages ... but this is slow work! :) Nevertheless, Sihler's _New Comparative Grammar of Greek & Latin_ is good stuff, and can be had for a pretty reasonable price given that it's a hardback academic publication. Also, Buck's _Grammar of Oscan & Umbrian_ can be had in a fairly decently priced paperback reprint.

Michael Weiss at Cornell used to have PDF drafts of his _Outline of the Comparitive Grammar of Latin_ online <http://ling.cornell.edu/ people/Weiss/weiss.html>, but that's going to receive official publication soon (later this year?), so it's down now. Still, there's some fragmentary drafts on some Sabellic religious texts still there, and it's well worth a look for those interested in "alternate Latins".

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea@hidden.email
http://www.carlaz.com/