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On 05/02/2007 21:06, eamoniski wrote:
I recently read a lengthy article on JSTOR (unfortunately, I can't remember the title or the author) which was a very thorough summary of the evolution from classical to vulgar and I did take notes. For one thing there was a certain bit of chaos in the evolution of the noun endings; sometimes even what case was borrowed varied from noun to noun and from singular to plural. In general the pattern seemed to be that the noun was borrowed in the accusative, losing that weak final m: amicum > amicu > amico > amigo, for example
There's a good summary of the process in Ralph Penny's _A History of the Spanish Language_. It focuses in the outcomes in Spanish (of course) but it takes in the development through a 2-case system such as found in Old Occitan and Old French, and so much of the discussion is relevant to Western Proto-Romance in general (I see Penny's discussion sometimes referenced from other works that treat this issue).
I've been working on an "alternative Romance" family where I have two widespread derivatives from Proto-Italic, one more like Oscan perhaps and the other more like Latin, but both fairly archaic in comparison with real Latin. But I envisage a later process of convergence through the development of a Koine-style dialect that levels many of the differences and reduces the number of cases. I keep tweaking the case-endings on the 2 main parent languages around as I try to keep declensional patterns in the Koine behaving the way I want :) though I am also considering having the Koine dialect later fragment and solidify into several daughter languages that may preserve more or fewer features of whichever older parent language was most common in their geographical region (the older languages perhaps being in continued use as prestige/liturgical dialects, and thereby influencing their contemporary their offpsring?).
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@hidden.email http://www.carlaz.com/