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Peter Collier skrev:
> Do all the modern romance langs derive their past
> participles from the Latin -ATVS / -ATA / -ATAM etc?
Yes.
> I'm trying to consider an alternative because 'my' pp
> ceases to be distinctive very early on (I lose the final S
> almost immediately,
FWIW I'm not so sure that -S would be lost. For one thing
it did persist for quite some time in Gallo-Romance, and
for the other it was -z, the voiced s, which was lost in
West Germanic, while the voiceless -s remained. Which final
-s'es became voicelsess and not was originally determined
by the position of the PIE accent (Verner's law), so it
must have differed between words, but then different
Germanic languages leveled it out differently: Old English
had gen.sg. stanes and nom./acc.pl. stanas, while Old Norse
had steins/steinar,Mod.German Stein(e)s/Steine (prob. <
*staines/*stainôz, I don't have the sources by me, and I
don't remember off the top of my head). So in principle
your lang could preserve Latin -s, though it would perhaps
not be in character to preserve nom.sg.(masc.) -s?
> quickly followed by the final vowel, so e.g. AMATVS > AMAT
> by about the year 500 CE...) Maybe with the auxilliary
> verb there too the distinction is clear, but I want to be
> able to put the pp at the end of the clause if I can, as
> with German, so I worry it becomes a little vague.
I'm not wholly convinced that such a vagueness is something
that must be resisted. With the risk of repeating myself
this is the kind of thing that happens in language. Part of
the fun of diachronic conlanging is IMHO to follow the flow
and see where your GMP takes you. Besides German is about
equally vague in those cases where a verb already has a
prefix. OTOH the idea that a Germano-Romance lang would
develop an equivalent of ge- is kind of cool, and the added
incentive that speakers perceive a vagueness in existing
markers due to phonetic attrition is also the kind of thing
which happens in language.
<AFMOC> When developing Slvanjek I ran into a similar
problem since Slavic langs have one past tense form which is
actually a participle (inflected for gender and number but
not for person: byl byla bylo byli 'he she it they were')
and a full set of present and past active and passive
participles that function as actual participles. At the time
I choose to essentially keep the latin system, but lately
(learning more about slavlangs) I've considered using -
ATUS/A/I/AE as a past tense and form a 'new' set of
adjectival participles thus:
|
| active passive
|
| present -ANTE -ATURUS
|
| past -ATIVUS -ATICUS
|
The past active masculine AMATIVUS would be omatjev and it's
dative plural omatvov (*AMATIVUBUS) that a form like
CIVITATIBUS at the same time becomes czítatjev doesn't
trouble me in the least. </AFMOC>
> I believe the German ge- (OHG ga-) stems originally from
> PIE *kom-. The Latin development of the same led to CVM,
> so maybe I'll just use 'cu(m/n)-' and leave it to
> conhistorians to puzzle over the anachronism.
Rather than asking what is the etymological counterpart of
ge-, which Germans learning Latin in the first century would
have no way of knowing, you should ask what the closest
semantic equivalent in Vulgar Latin would be. Incidentally
in this case it would probably be either CON or PER. In fact
PER has some things going for it:
1. It was semantically bleached in Vulgar Latin, tending to
be replaced or merge with PRO/*POR.
2. PER can also more easily be replaced by some other
prefix like PRO, FORAS(*) or TRANS in those cases where
it retains its full meaning: I can easily see
PERSUADERE become PROSUADERE, but what would CONVINCERE
become? You could even have PER lose its R becoming PE
as it did in Rumanian.
(*) Apparently the bilingual Franks and Burgundians of Gaul
equated FORAS with Germanic *for-: Old French forfaire,
forbattre, forconseiller, forceler, forostagier, forjurer,
fornier; Old Provençal forabandir, for(a)sbandir,
forsfaire, foragitar etc. This seems to be a nice thing to
borrow for Germano-Romance (Henrik, see Meyer-Lübke 3317!)
OTOH you may not see a big problem with VINCERE and
CONVINCERE sharing a pp, that's OK. Such things happen in
real languages after all. You could perhaps also replace
cases like CONVINCERE with calques like *SUPERTRACTARE. It
could even be kind of fun, although you should probably not
want your lang to become a macaronic parody! In some cases
where CON actually means 'together' it might be replaced by
INSIMUL (insemelwiber?).
> This is getting damned tricky. I can see why the Germanic
> tribes didn't take to Latin! ;)
Actually the Visigoths are said to have been Latin-speaking
when they arrived in Spain. I register my doubts, as they
seem to have kept their Germanic naming customs intact.
Perhaps they were fully and actively bilingual.
<AFMOC> The Burgundians in Lucal Gaul, as an ethnic and
religious minority, preserved their language into the
thirteenth century. Essentially I'm applying the Romance-
inspired GMP of Rhodrese on Germanic... </AFMOC>
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Truth, Sir, is a cow which will give [skeptics] no
more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."
-- Sam. Johnson (no rel. ;)