Re: yet another romance conlang

Fabian wrote:

> > Ju:dajca is spoken in an alternate-history conearth where the Romans
> > didn't succeed in wiping Judea off the map.  a bit nicer than the romans
> > in RL, these con-romans' plan for stopping judean revolts was to attempt
> > to swamp the country with imperial colonists.  contrary to their plans,
> > instead of the jews assimilating into the colonists, the colonists
> > assimilated into the judeans.
Well, MAYBE it would work.  But Roman colonization didn't work that way.
"Coloniae" were set up by the state to reinforce newly made conquests (more in
the Republican period) or to settle veteran soldiers (more during the Empire).
I know there were some freelancers who went out on their own to the new
provinces in Africa and Nearer Spain after the Second Punic War, but immigration
from Italy then did not generally operate like immigration does today.

> Would any of the groups use greek script?
Well... it depends.  I don't think the ancients really thought of alphabets
as the kind of thing you just impose on foreign languages which had hitherto
never had any written language.  Usually, as in the case of Cyril and Methodius'
invention of Cyrilic, or Ulfilas' Gothic, or Gaelic, they created a wholly *new*
alphabet, very obviously *based* on the other, older script, but not the same.
If a group of Romance speakers had lived in, say, the Crimea  [1],
where they would  be far from any nearby centers of civilization (and thus, Latin),
they just might adopt Greek or Cyrilic if they had totally lost all knowledge of Latin
literacy -- but those are a lot of ifs.  The liklihood is that, if there were *any*
knowledge of Classical Latin in a Romance speaking community, that community
would adopt Classical Latin script and kinda force it on to their everyday speech,
as happened in Western Europe.

[1] I'll grant that Romanian *was* written in Cyrilic until around the 19th or 20th
centuries.

> I'd love to create a Latin/something meld, but all the good ones seem to be
> taken, or too unlikely, or too hard to research. Latin/Arabic is essentially
> Maltese. Latin/Germanic is esentially English. Latin/Swahili is essentially
> improbable. Latin/Japanese is out there with the pixies.
>
> Hmm, wasn't there this group of Roman soldiers who got lost and ended up in
> China?
Yep!  Not actually lost, but they were being held captive by the Parthians
after one of their numerous wars with Rome.  There are some Han Chinese
records that describe, within the lifetime of those captives, a Han army
making new conquests in Sogdiana, something like present day Kazakhstan,
and coming up against these weird new soldiers who fought with advanced
battle tactics and armor "like fish scales", which is a pretty accurate description
of standard legionary issue.   The theory is that the Parthians had been holding
them out in one of their far eastern domains, the Han invaded, and sacked
the city, coming up against these people inside.

(For the life of me, I can't remember where I got that tidbit of information;
I think it was from a research project I was doing in a book published in
1894 or something...)

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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