Brithenig misunderstood (was: Costanice Phonology Sketch)

On Friday, April 15, 2005, at 07:45 , Thomas Wier wrote:

> Jesse wrote:
[snip]
>> From this point on the language was heavily
>> influence by Spanish. About 150 years later their descendants began to
>> emmigrate to South America where, after some oppression and a few
>> failed revolutions, they eventually got their own state speaking their
>> offshoot of Greek, now called Costanice ( < konstantinike:).
>
> Why didn't this group of people simply become assimilated to
> the local culture, as the real Greeks who fled to Italy did?
..and also, sadly, the real Welsh who settled Patagonia which is now part
of Argentina.

[snip]
> I do not mean the following as a criticism of your project, but
> something I've never understood about certain historical projects
> like this and Brithenig is the idea that the substrate language
> (Latin or, here, Greek) would be so influenced by some other language
The situation with Brithenig is very different. Latin was _not_ the
substrate language. Also Brithenig starts from a real situation that
actually existed in our world: the almost four centuries of Roman
occupation of Britain (from the Claudian invasion in 43 CE till
Constantine III withdrew the legions in 406).

There is no doubt that in the urban centers of Roman Britain, Vulgar Latin
had replaced native languages, just as it had in Gaul, the Iberian
peninsular & elsewhere. If the Saxons and other Germanic settlers had not
displaced the Romano-British population but had either been halted or, as
elsewhere, been absorbed into the Romance speaking milieu, then English
would not have taken root, the Brittonic langs would've disappeared as did
the Celtic langs in Gaul, and Britain would now be another Romance
speaking area. Brithenig is a serious attempt to reconstruct what such a
Romance language might now be like (I know this from private
correspondence with Andrew).

One only has to examine the Romance languages of Iberia, Gaul, Italy & the
Balkans to see that other languages did influence the different ways in
which Vulgar Latin developed in these areas. There is no reason to think
Britain would have been any different in this respect.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

Replies