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----- Original Message ----- From: "Benct Philip Jonsson" <bpj@hidden.email>
To: <romconlang@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 2:20 PM Subject: Re: [romconlang] past particple
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?
My understanding of V's Law is that the relevant consonants became voiced if the preceding vowel was unstressed (with a few blocking conditions to take into account). I don't know if the PIE stress is different to CL, or by how much, but as I only have the CL to go on it's moot anyway (no-one is going to check too closely, right?). With the Latin penult stress rules applying, the final vowel will always be unstressed, so /s/ | _# will always become /z/ and then ultimately /Ø/.
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.
The fun is indeed in the process more than the result, you're right. The problem I have right now is having a very limited vocab but still trying to see the whole puzzle from the few pieces available to try and keep it all on track. Being a bit of a control freak...
The challenge of course is that Latin is all about word final inflections, and the Germanics are about levelled endings, vowel changes and word order, and you need to try and get from the one to the other in a logical and linguistically consistent way without landing in shapeless meaningless goo somewhere in the middle. On a few occasions now I've ended up in a lingiuistic cul-de-sac and had to back track and try a different approach. On some occasions though, you feel it's the right way but nevertheless it reaches a stage where the attrition goes too far and any naturally developing language would innovate out of necessity - and then it's a question of trying to figure out what 'they' might do.
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:
I know, it was a bit of lazy blue sky thinking on my part. I wasn't too sure whence the ge- had come, other than it had developed from an earlier germanic ga-,and had only just looked it up earlier that day. Early days for the idea, I'll be kicking it around for a while yet. PER is an interesting suggestion.
Pete