Re: Conlang collaboration

En réponse à Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:

>
> Which means that French is nothing like the idea I had in mind.
Indeed.

 I
> suppose
> that in Post-Roman Gaul, Latin retained a prestige status as the
> language
> of the Church, so limiting the Germanic influence.
What happened is that unlike the Roman invasion of the Gaul, where the Romans
were seen as superior, brought their schools and language with them, the
Germanic tribes had no interest in "educating" the people they invaded, and
left the centers of knowledge alone. Also, while the Romans mixed with the
Gaulish people, the Franks didn't mix with the local population that much,
staying in military camps separated from the areas of local population. The
Romans had a policy of assimilation with their invasions. The Franks had no
such policy. As a result, Latin stayed indeed the written prestige language,
while the influence of Old Frankish remained limited (as I said, mostly present
in lexicon, and mostly in military lexicon). The biggest Germanic influence has
been that their invasion separated the people from the centers of knowledge for
good, accelerating the separation of Gallo-Roman from Latin.

 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?
>
Probably the same as English under Normand rule indeed, i.e. a Romance language
with a strong Germanic superstrate, which would probably bring a lot of
lexicon, but would have at best a limited effect on the morphology (by bringing
maybe some affixes, and simplifying the conjugations somewhat). Still, as
English is still recognisably a Germanic language, that language would stay
recognisably a Romance language.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

PS: about non-pro-drop in French and German. Could it be that non-pro-drop is
an areal feature, reaching unrelated languages which are geographically close
to each other and making them looking different from other languages from their
families? It does look like one, like the use of rounded front vowels among the
same languages (or the use of "want" as future in Bulgarian, Romanian, Modern
Greek and Macedonian for instance). And in areal features, it seems that you
can't really decide whether one of the languages influenced the others. It's
more something like a parallel development.