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Bons jorns a tot!Over the past few months I've been working on a new romance language: Bretagneis. I don't think I've introduced it here before (given my silence on the lists over the past four or so years, it's hardly surprising)- so before asking your advice on it, it's probably a good idea to quickly describe the language first.
Essentially, it's a thought-experiment in the same vein as Brithenig: what would a language derived from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman province of Britannia be like? Unlike Brithenig, however, I've tried to focus more on the ad- and substratal effects of Celtic, rather than assuming that sound-changes have "inertia". As such, the development is in the main an attempt to extrapolate from current ideas of what British VL was like by analogy with neighbouring Romance languages, and making use of what we know about the interactions between the Celtic languages in Britain during the Dark Ages. At the moment I'm working on the mediaeval dialects of the language, particularly the prestige variety spoken around Coreins (Corinium- Cirencester).
So, I'm currently having a crisis of indecision about the retention of the pluperfect indicative in Old Bretagneis. That it was retained in the first place is pretty secure: as the Brythonic pluperfect is clearly a calque of the Latin formation, it is relatively secure that the pluperfect indicative was an active feature in the VL of Britain (in contrast to the total disappearance of the feature in the neighbouring Oil dialects). What I can't decide on is the *usage* of the descendent form. I've been considering the following natlang precedents:
- In Middle Welsh, the pluperfect had both simple pluperfect meaning, and a secondary "perfect conditional" meaning. - In Cornish, a conditional meaning is far more frequently attached to the reflex of the Brythonic pluperfect. - In Modern Castilian, the reflexes of the Latin pluperfect indicative are simply alternative forms of the preterite subjunctive. - In Old Spanish, however, it was used as a straight pluperfect, and as a conditional perfect. - In Old Occitan, the Latin pluperfect indicative became the "second conditional", a perfect conditional, essentially.
There's a fairly universal tendency towards pluperfect > conditional shift, which is probably the result of the pluperfect indicative's frequency in the apodosis of conditional structures in Latin. So I'm happy enough to go with a "perfect conditional" meaning, particularly when the protasis is a preterite condition, but I'm not sure whether to retain a straight pluperfect meaning as well. In the following sentence there's a conditional meaning of the reflex:
El prèntre na manczara lo buèf, si-l fos mercordis. The priest would not have eaten the beef, if it were Wednesday. But I'm not sure about: El prèntre na manczara lo buèf quand nous lo vizmes. The priest hadn't eaten the beef when we saw him.I like the structure, particularly as in Old Bretagneis at least the synthetic preterite remained strong, and a synthetic pluperfect matches that better (IMO) than "El prèntre n'avéia manczat lo buèf quand nous lo vizmes." But it doesn't seem to be all that plausible, if you know what I mean. So advice would be appreciated!
ObIYCQuestion: do any of your conlangs retain the Romance pluperfect indicative? And if so, what do you do with it?
Ay l'onour d'escre, mei nòvle segnour, vòstr' esclaus el mengre, Danièls de Mèrcoins