Hellenic Romance? (was [CONLANG] Re: Babel text in Spanzhol)

All this has re-awakened an old dormant project bubbling away in the back
of my brain.

What if Latin hadn't risen as the language of the Roman Empire, and Greek
had been the status-lect and the ordinary-lect up until the end of
Latin-as-a-living-language? How would the Romance languages have turned
out, assuming similar phonetic and semantic drift took place as "here"?

I don't have a Classical Greek lexicon to hand, nor a comprehensive
treatment of the sound changes, otherwise I'd rustle up a few examples.

Any takers?





Paul

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