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Hi! Peter Collier writes: > I'm just playing "devil's advocate" here, as I'm a great admirer of your > creation, but I'm just wondering a couple of things. Firstly, you list > your very first sound changes as being > > [f]↦[θ] > [d]↦[ð] > [b]↦[β] > [ɡ]↦[ɣ] > [kt]↦[χt] > [pt]↦[ft] > > to adapt latin to the local phonology, but didn't all these consonants also > exisit in Gmc/North Gmc, which would make them unlikely to disappear? The > loss of /b d g/ from a Gmc phoneme inventory seems quite odd! They are usually *written* as <b d g>, but the phonemes are /B D G/. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic Although -k- and -t- exist in Germanic, -kt- does not, but -ht- does. E.g. Proto-French, as I mentioned, also shifted -kt- to -ht-, by Celtic influence. -pt- is pronounced -ft- by the same influence of Germanic. > Secondly, the use of an icelandic orthograpy seems "un-authentic" > from a conhistorical point of view, as Þrjótrunn predates most > (all?) Scandinavian literature. ... Well, first note that Latin did not eliminate Germanic instantaneously. Runic inscriptions were indeed found (even some in Latin presumably by people who only knew the Runic alphabet). Anyway, the Institute for Parallel Histories have not yet commented on this very much, but I think the modern orthography must be due to some influencial scholars in the 1600s or 1700s who wanted a distinct look of Þrjótrunn as a North Romance language indicating some Germanic heritage. The rune þ was used for a sound that the Latin alphabet had no letter for. > Would a latin-derived orthography of some kind not be more likely? Well, I am not describing the most *likely* history. From our point of view, that would sure be our own history. I am describing *the* history that led to Þrjótrunn. Likeliness is, well, irrelevant since that parallel history not interconnected with our history in a way that allows reasoning about likelyness. :-) Of course, the notion of likeliness is very strange for diachronic *conlangs* anyway, but we do seem to have some intuition about what it means. > The literate Norwegian/Icelandic citizens of the time would imagine > they were speaking and writing "Romanice", after all. > > That said, I wouldn't consider chaging the orthography because it makes > Þrjótrunn look fantastic. I ask only because I struggle with the same > question for my language. Common sense suggests they would write, for > example, Ríneç, but I still think Rienech looks better. It fully depends on your design goals. I am of no help. If you look at similarly constructed diachronic conlangs, e.g. Brithenig, Wenedyk, etc. you will see that the orthography is similarly 'unlikely'. (And further note that 'Wenedyk' is foreign orthography in Wenedyk, selected because Jan van Steenbergen liked it better). > I also wonder: did anything determine for you when /ks/ became /sk/, or did > you just decide for different words at random? If the shift consistently changes all forms, I will allow it in any case. If not, e.g. 'rex, regem, rege, regis' where only nom.sg. allows the change, I will decide whether: a) the word becomes irregular (nom.sg. résk, others without -sk-) or b) the word is regularized to only use -sk- forms or c) the word is regularized to use no -sk- forms Something like this. **Henrik