Re: Romula: tense system - request for comments

At 11:17 pm +1300 4/1/00, andrew wrote:
[snip]
>news.  This is the bad news; my quibbles:
>
>Why -mus for the second person plural ending rather than -mos?  Short
>Latin U tends to become O in most Romance languages including in this
>position.
Latin [U] (Classical short u) merged with [O:] (Clasical long o) to give
[o] in all the early western Romance varieties.  In the east there seems to
have been a drift towards post-tonic [U], [u:] and [o:] all becoming [u];
but the eastern Romance forms either lose final -s entirely or develop a
palatal sound, e.g. /uj/ --> /i/.   In Romanian the -us has disappeared
completely leaving only -m to denote 1st. pers. pl.

But Artyom states quite clearly that it belongs somewhere in the western
group; thus, as Andrew says, one would expect -mos.

>> For whose who's still wondering,;-) io=I, tu=you (sg), ille, -a, -o = he,
>> she, it, nos=we, vos=you (pl), illos=they.
>>
>Ille for the masculine third person pronoun seems wrong to me.  It might
>be good latin but it seems bad Romance to me.  Ille and illo should
>collapse into a single form, illo.  Unless you have made a decision for
>natural gender rather than gramatical gender the latin neuter is not
>distinguished from from the masculine in later languages.
If Romula were designed as an inter-Romance IAL (or even a more general IAL
like Interlingua or Latino Moderne) then natural gender might be OK; but to
quote Artyom himself: "The thing I tried to achieve in Romula was a
creating conlang that would be VERY like standard romance natlang, more
precisely, Romula would be one of
langs in a line Italian-Catalan-Occitan-Spanish-Galician/Galego-Portuguese."

In that case natural gender must go; Romula will be credible only with the
grammatical two-gender system still preserved to this day in
Italian-Catalan-Occitan-Spanish-Galician/Galego-Portuguese, i.e. nouns are
either masculine or feminine - there are no neuters.

The only use of a neuter could be the 'conceptual neuter' found in the some
of the Iberian Romance languages.

But I have to disagree with Andrew.  Both French 'il' and Italian 'egli'
are derived from 'ille' ('illo' would've given *el in French); I believe
Spanish 'el' is also from that form.

BUT - I'm afraid short Latin 'i' becomes 'e' in the western Romance langs.
Certainly you should have 'ella' and 'ello' not 'illa' & 'illo'.  The
French form shows that the 'i' might have remained in 'ille', but this the
result of palatalization caused by final -e.  Not sure whether Romula has
palatalized 'l' or not, nor how it might spelt ({ll} as in Spanish, {lh} as
in Portuguese, {gl} as in Italian ??).

>Spanish, at
>least, has developed a neuter as a secondary development.
Yes, as a conceptual neuter - it is found also in Portuguese (and I guess
Galician).

>> Irregular verbs are only 4, as in Latino Moderne – ser, haber, vader, dar
>>
>Languages mix dar and donar?  Odd, I hadn't noticed.
I haven't noticed this either.

French & Catalan use only forms derived from 'donare'.
Italian, Spanish & Portuguese use only forms derived from 'dare' for all
parts of "to give".
I don't have information on Galician.

[....]
>
>The spelling haber strikes me as unusual.  I would have expected
>something like *aver.
Unless, as in Spanish, both 'v' and 'b' are pronounced alike, in which case
'haber' might've been "restored" spelling.

>> That's all. I'm curious, are all the inflexions correct for a "standard
>> average ROMANCE" conlang? Must not be there more irregular verbs?
>>If must,
>> that the irregularities must be? And the main thing: is it all
>> understandable for a native romance-lang speaker without explanations? I
>> intended it to be so...
>>
>The inflections seem correct to me.  Although I have just realised that
>past definate tenses can be irregular.
It the present indicative that presents the greatest number of
irregularities in the modern Romance langs.  Many are caused because the
Latin vowels have developed differently according to whether they are
stressed or not, cf. the Spanish present tense of 'dormir':
        duermo       dormimos
        duermes      dormís
        duerme       duermen

And as Andrew says, the past definite can be irregular, e.g.:
       dormí         dormimos
       dormiste      dormisteis
       durmió        durmieron

i.e. if the stem vowel is stressed it is 'ue'
     if the stem vowel comes immediately before the stress it is 'o'
     elsewhere it is 'u'

The fun the Romancelangs lose by dropping noun cases, they sure make up for
with their verbs   :)

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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