Re: Romance Lang Names...

En réponse à Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>:

>
> I didnt want to use something like 'Romano", or Romançe (how
> unoriginal),
> so I thought like the other Romance languages, i'd name it after it's
> place of origin (I usually say either Monterey or Marina when I tell
> people where I live).
>
I have the same idea with "Roumant" (I don't want to use this name too much
because it's only temporary, but as long as I don't have a name...). "Roumant"
/ru'ma~/ obviously comes from "Romance" or whatever it was in Latin. I don't
want to derive the name from "Latin" either, so I've decided to name it after a
place. But I want to make it a language with a conculture, and I'm still
wondering where to put it (I'm leaning toward the South-East of France, where
there's already provençal and occitan, but I don't want to copy any of these
names). So until I found the right place, I'm stuck with a temporary name I
dislike...

One of my ideas (a posteriori idea, not the idea I had when I designed this
language) is that it could be what could have been French if, instead of being
based upon the dialects of langue d'oil*, it had been based on the dialects of
langue d'oc*. That would suppose that it would take place in an alternate
time-line where the invasion of the Francs (with Clovis at their head) didn't
happen or was stopped, and where the political centre of France would have been
much more in the South than in OTL... I'm wondering if it's plausible...

*For those who are unaware of the linguistic geography of France, here's a quick
and dirty (very dirty, because I'm doing that by memory and I'm not sure my
memory's correct about that) course:
France is (or was, because the linguistic terrorism the Republic's education did
nearly destroyed all dialects and languages other than French) separated in
three main domains (corresponding to three main groups of Romance dialects): the
domain of the langues d'oil (nearly everything in the North of the Loire, one of
the main rivers of France), in contact with Brittany (domain of Celtic
languages) and the very North and North-East (more Germanic), the domain of the
langues de si (the South-West and the Pyreneans, and Corsica), in contact with
the Basque Country, and the domain of the langues d'oc (the South-East and the
Provence). All those "langues" are called after the way each dialect of these
groups said "yes". Of course, this is not really correct: all of this is a
continuum, and I may be wrong (my geographic knowledge is very sketchy, I never
liked Geography classes at school :) ). But let's take that as a beginning.
French itself, then, is merely the dialect of Paris (a langue d'oil /Ojl/, hence
oui /wi/ in French) heavily influenced by the language of the Francs (a Germanic
tongue) and by Normand (another langue d'oil), and various other influences,
like langues d'oc, etc... It became the language of all the French nation simply
because the reunion of all parts into one French nation took place mostly from
North to South.
Well, this is surely full of mistakes and approximations, but that's what I know
about dialectical divisions in France, as they were before the Revolution at
least.

Christophe.