Sketch of Germanech 0/4: Introduction

Germanech is a Romance language as it might have evolved in a
romanized Germany.  The south and west of Germany were under Roman
rule long enough to allow the spread of Vulgar Latin as a widely
spoken language; however, it did not subsist for long after the Roman
Empire collapsed (though a pocket of Romance persisted in the Trier
area until the 11th century).

The language is inspired by Brithenig, which has spawned a host of
Romance and other alternative-history conlangs.  The basic idea
underlying the design of Germanech is to take Common Romance and pull
it through the changes that transformed Common West Germanic into
German *here*.  There is little more to say about it here and now; the
conculture associated with it is still rather sketchy, but imagine a
modern western European country like many others, culturally somewhat
halfways between France and Germany *here*, probably Catholic
wine drinkers rather than Protestant beer drinkers, and you get the
picture.  (I don't think that Germanech is spoken in the northern half
of what is Germany *here*; that would be a separate nation, named
Saxony and speaking Saxon, which would be essentially what we know as
Low German.)

I hope the accented letters arrive intact everywhere.  It seems to me
that they don't make any problems in the mailing list (they are just
plain ISO Latin-1), but one cannot be absolutely sure.  So if you see
any garbled characters in my posts on Germanech, refer to the
following list of accented letters:

ä  a-umlaut (a with 2 dots above)
ö  o-umlaut (o with 2 dots above)
ü  a-umlaut (u with 2 dots above)
é  e with acute accent

...brought to you by the Weeping Elf and the letter "ö"

Jörg.
.

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