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Peter Collier skrev:
>> <AFMOCL>
>
> 'AFMOCL' ?
>
AFMOC(L) = "as for my own conlang". One of the group-badge
abbreviations used in the CONLANG-L subculture.
See <http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang-L_FAQ#Acronyms>
>> 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/.
My understanding is that by the time Latin reached Germania
- Verner's Law had long since ceased to be operative,
- Latin -S was and remained voiceless,
- -S ought to remain in a Germano-Romance which preserves
cases, rather as it did in Old French
+ You would get the same weird situation as in Old
French where 2nd declension masculines would get
nominative singular identical to accusative plural,
*and vice versa*!
- A lot of -s might seem out of character for a German-like
lang, but OTOH the -(e)s genitive is quite prevalent
especially in somewhat older texts, before the colloquial
expression with von encroached upon the written language
(not that it's IMHO a Bad Thing for written language to
stay in synch with spoken language, mind you! :-)
>> 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...
I know the feeling. It's especially frustrating when you
apply a certain process to get a desired result in one part
of vocab, and it leads to undesirable results in another
part of vocab.
> 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.
Usually in real languages attrition runs its course
and then 'they' create some new 'roundabout' expression
with existing material.
>> 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.
At the same time CON feels somehow more realistic to me,
including having some semantic vagueness which invites
reinterpretation.
> Pete
>
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
c'est qu'elles meurent." (Victor Hugo)