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--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, "Benct Philip Jonsson"
<melroch@...> wrote:
> ...However I have problems seeing
> such a lenition occur connected to the Western Romance voicing
> lenition.
Likewise.
> ...Moreover if you follow Hall's
> chronology the Western Romance lenition would be too late: the High
> German consonant shift was already (pre)history when OHG writing in
> Latin script began early in the ninth century. This means that the
> split between Gallo-Romance and Germano-Romance must have occurred
> some centuries earlier.
Agreed. The HG shift is posited as dating from around 500 CE, give or
take. Given that the two shifts (HG and WRom) are incompatible, it is
serendipitous that the chronology won't allow the one language to go
through both changes!
> It may however well be that Hall's absolute
> chronology is in error. I don't know how Hall would have reconciled
> his late dating of lenition with the fact that confusion of
> voiceless
> and voiced stop letters PB, TD, CG occurs in late imperial age
> inscriptions! Even in Rome itself, whose modern dialect is not
> leniting. This means that voicing of intervocalic stops was already
> then so widespread that a stonecutter coming from the west could find
> employment in Rome in spite of making such spelling mistakes!
I think I shall just get a long-handled broom and sweep that as far
under the carpet as possible.
> ... Or do you want to abandon HGCS?
No, that's the language's whole Raison d'etre. :)
After some thinking, and the excellent (as always) input from you and
others, I think the following general scheme seems to be taking form:
With regards to a POD, that's pretty clear cut. It can't be before the
Roman invasions of Germania, which were first century BCE (OTL at any
rate) and it can't be any later than the HGCS in the 5th century CE
+/- (Unless I start re-writing prehistory as well as language!).
On that basis the language needs to develop with Western/Gallo-Romance
until just after the start of the common era. So, the consonants will
undergo the assimilation we know of from that time.
Over the next few centuries the languages are going to continue more
or less side by side, but gradually diverging as some changes to the
basic 'transrhenanian' phonology caused by the Germanic substrate are
going to have the Gauls thinking the Romano-Germans sound a bit weird.
Linguistically during this period (more or less the imperial period)
there's palatisation across all of the West, including Germania in the
North when the right conditions exist.
Finally from the 5th century on, there is the North Roman (HG)
consonant shift taking place east of the Rhine, and intervocalic
voicing to the west, which is going to force everyone to pack their
phrasebooks when they plan a trip to the other side of the River.
Sound about right?
Pete.