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----- Original Message ----- From: "Padraic Brown" <elemtilas@hidden.email>
To: <romconlang@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 10:57 PM Subject: Re: [romconlang] Alternate teminology
Perhaps I'm missing something... Why would they call certain Romance languages "Germanic" but not the others? I hope you're nor positing a world of stupid linguists that can't differentiate related languages of separate families!
A brief con-history: Romans sucessfully colonise Germania and in a large portion of that area a Latin dialect surplants the original Germanic vernacular. The Romance dialects that evolve in that region are referred to as Germanic, beacuse they are the dialects from Germania, in the same way as you also have iberic, gallic and italic dialects/languages. If you prefer, a synonym for this imaginary description of Germanic might be "Northern Romance", to contrast with Western and Eastern. It has nothing to do with what in reality *here* we call Germanic.
I guess if you mean "Germanic" to be a sub-grouping of Romance languages, then I would suspect that "Romance" is already used as a general term for all Latin derived languages (of which these "Germanic" languages are a group) and also that there is some other word for Germanic languages, like "Teutonic".
Precisely. Romance is the overarching family, which is is divided into 3 main groups, the two real ones and my imaginary third, which are then further divided into the various latin based modern languages and dialects. If you like, think of the River Rhine and the Limes as a second "Spezia-Rimini" Line.
But if the word "Germanic" is used for a subgroup of Romance languages, it would not be used to refer to the language familiy that encorporates Low German/LowSaxon, Dutch, Danish etc. That family would be called something else, and that is what i was wondering about.
Me I think "Saxonic" and "Nordic" are too local sounding, too regional. If not "Teutonic", then how about "Allemanic" (based on an old Latin name for the Germanic tribes)?
Teutonic would work, but I have no languages left whose speakers refer to themselves as Deutsch/Dutch/Duits, so I had put that expression to one side. The langauge we call Dutch in English is Nederlands to them, and in the absence of what we call German (Hochdeutsch), I suspect the language in Northern Germany, if it is differentiated from that of the Netherlands at all, would be called (Low-) Saxon (the real local dialect is of course Nedders�ssich) or perhaps, if political history followed a smilar course, Prussian.
Allemanic is a non-starter. In my mixed up linguistic world it exists, but slap bang in the middle of the Romance dialectal continuum: "Norzro Pfatter, qui y sy Kli escht, sankchte schjas zu Nom. Zu Ric vinjit. Zu Volunzas schjas tacte, supre sa Zer quomt y sy Klu..."