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re: In which groups can romlangs be devided?



Bun dai!

 

Cool. I was just working in Switzerland for two months and I made an effort to watch and listen to Telesguard every day, when I got off. It’s a very pretty Romlang indeed.

Cornish, Welsh and Breton share a great number of common Latin loans from the Roman period, some of which are part of the core vocabulary, which suggests that Latin was a very important influence on British at the time. It is very difficult to determine when exactly a given Latin loanword entered the language. Many words show distinction of vowel length, others do not. Some loans will show the British reflex of a long vowel in Wales, but not in Cornwall or Brittany, or vice versa. There are also doublets with and without vowel length. Sorry I can’t think of examples right now and I’m travelling, so I haven’t got my big fat Jackson and Schrijver on me. It seems that Latin was also in the process of losing distinctive vowel quantity during the Roman occupation of Britain, and it’s likely that you would have heard both conservative Latin vowel quantity, presumably by the Roman educated upper class, and innovative, popular Romance, I assume by soldiers, merchants etc. 

Of course British was also undergoing a very similar development, hardly a coincidence, by replacing distinctive vowel quantity with qualitative contrasts. 

I cannot determine what this says about how long vowel quantity was preserved in Britain or whether it was so done considerably longer than in continental varieties, but (gong by memory here) I remember reading that contemporaries actually commented on how conservative British Latin was – but then again that someone may have spoken to a rich Roman educated landowner who might have made it a special point to speak the Roman version of correct, standard literary Latin rather than some jargon the plebs used on the marked place… ;-)

Dan    

 

  _____  

From: thomasruhm
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2011 11:25 PM



Buna saira,

in Retoromance they also say 'buna saira', I am learning that language a bit more recently, because I found a learning partner. On Cornish there was something about the vowels in latin derived words. I wanted to ask that somebody who is working on Cornish. I read, that one can see that Latin learnt in Britain did keep the distinction of vowel length long, in the development of vowels in Cornish. Did you read about that?

Yours Thomas

--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com <mailto:romconlang%40yahoogroups.com> , "Daniel Prohaska" <daniel@...> wrote:
>
> Buna saira!
> 
> Yes, it was. Iâ’m so tied up with Cornish that I haven’t done much on Vegliot recently, but I still want to set it up at some point. 
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
> _____ 
> 
> From: thomasruhm
> Sent: Friday, April 29, 2011 10:55 PM
> 
> Oh, Dan, that was you. Vegliot was the first romlang I read about. I admire the project because of it's high symbolic value for the region.
> 
> Yours
> Thomas





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