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The issue of relative chronology of Romance sound changes got me thinking of the issue of palatalization, which was very early in Romance, occurring everywhere except in Sard and rearing its head in inscriptions perhaps already in early imperial times. How does one deal with that when making a bastardlang of Romance and a non-palatalizing language like High German, Old Norse, Britonic or Semitic? One may set a Point of Divergence so early that palatalization hadn't occurred, which means a BC POD, like Thrjótrun, or pushing palatalization forwards to be as late as it could possibly be, and setting ones POD late but not so late that palatalization had occurred or it was still at the /c/ stage and imperceptible to substrate speakers, or one can bastardize the other way around and introduce it into the bastard contra the substrate, as Brithenig and Bâzrâmani, and it might be a Good thing, when the substrate language has palatal sounds. So I got this idea how palatalization may be a Good Thing in a non-Anglo Germano-Romance lang: it may be a source of /T/ and it need not take 1500 years as in Castilian! According to some Old French had already reached a stage where the reflex of C' and TJ was a laminal [s_m] while the reflex of S was an apical [s_a]. Now we know that in modern Icelandic "/T/" is a laminal alveolar and /s/ is an apical alveolar. Imagine a Vulgar Latin dialect with such a distinction underlying a Germano-Romance bastard! You'd get CISTA > Dist/ Thist, VITIA > Wide, and GERMANIA > Jermeine! The snag is that in twelfth century French C' was probably still [ts], though certainly laminal, so that the idea might still work if one is prepared to believe that Germanic substrate speakers heard a laminal [ts_m] as their /T/. One would still get /ke/ from QUE and /kve/ from QUA with umlaut! The big advantage is that you get to have a late separation from Gallo-Romance, practically coinciding with the consonant shift. The disadvantage of course is that OTL German doesn't show palatalization in Latin loans. /BP -- / BP