Re: Languages in fiction: The Triune Monarchy

Thanks for replying, John! I knew I could count on you. :)

John Cowan wrote:
 > My conlang Piat is spoken there too.

Oh yeah... I think I vaguely remember you talking about Piat here a
couple of years back. What kind of languages is it? Do you  have
anything on line or anything you could post here? I'd be curious to see.

 > > Gothic: would this be an East Germanic language descended from
 > > Wulfila's Gothic?

 > Surely it would. The official language of Piatland is still
 > Court-Gothic, it being far too expensive to translate all the records
 > into Piat.

What do you suppose it would be like? Do you think it would have changed
a lot from "Wulfilan" Gothic, or do you think it would be pretty
conservative? Would it have picked up a lot of Slavic and/or Romance
loanwords, given where it's spoken?

 > I've always assumed that the Avars referred to are the Turkic-speakers
 > who were part of the Voelkerwanderung that destroyed the Roman Empire

Aha, so there would be another Turkic language spoken in Europe besides
Turkish? Would you happen to know -- since you're the fount of all
knowledge ;) -- is there any other name by which these Turkic-speaking
Avars were known? Or would you have any idea which modern Turkic
languages would be closest to Avar?

 > The proper names show that it's a variety of Romance, and clearly
 > related to Romanian.

Interesting. I wonder how close to Romanian it would be.

 > The Vlox-speakers call themselves the Veloshchii, but the name must be
 > connected with Vlach (unless we have another coincidence here). So we
 > have a Romance language heavily overlaid with Slavic, or perhaps vice
 > versa.

Hmm. I always thought the idea of a "reverse Romanian", i.e. a Slavic
language which had absorbed lots of Romance words as opposed to a
Romance language which had absorbed lots of Slavic words, would be
interesting. I wonder if Vlox would be something sort of like that.

 > Davidson borrowed Ruritania from Anthony Hope's famous romances
 > _The Prisoner of Zenda_ and its lesser-known sequel _Rupert of
 > Hentzau_. They speak German, though their onomastics show that they
 > have not always done so.

Which begs the questions of (a) how did they end up speaking German, (b)
   how different would a variety of German spoken so far away from the
other lands where German is spoken be from the rest of German? Would
they have a diglossic situation like in Switzerland, where they write in
Standard German but speak a very different dialect(s)?

 > Graustark is from another romance, also called _Graustark_, by George
 > Barr McCutcheon, which I have not read. All three books are available
 > at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.net).

To my shame I must admit to not having heard of any of the three books
you've mentioned. But thank you very much for the info & link. I shall
have to look them up!

Thomas

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