Re: Conlang collaboration

Staving Christophe Grandsire:
>En réponse à Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:
>
> >
> > Which then raises the question, which elements of French are Frankish
> > influenced?
> >
>
>Nearly none. The Frankish influence can only be seen in the lexicon, not
>in the
>morphology or syntax. It reintroduced two phonemes that Gallo-Roman had
>lost: /h/ and /w/. But /h/ was lost again and /w/ was mostly borrowed as [gw]
>(it's still done in Spanish for instance). Hence the English "war" and the
>French "guerre" have the same Germanic origin (also important thing: the
>Germanic borrowings in French concern mostly military vocabulary). Another
>influence (but that's more due to the effect of the invasion rather than a
>linguistic cause) is that it accelerated the differentiation of the different
>Gallo-Roman dialects into unintelligible languages.
Which means that French is nothing like the idea I had in mind. I suppose
that in Post-Roman Gaul, Latin retained a prestige status as the language
of the Church, so limiting the Germanic influence. Hence my motivation for
postulating a conquest in pre-Christian times. What happens if the Roman
ruling class is entirely replaced by a German one, leaving German as the
unquestioned elite language, while Latin remains a majority common tongue?

Pete Bleackley

Reply