Re: A (Long) First Text in Costanice

> >>
> >> TON EVANGELLO CADA MARCO
> >>
> >> Ten arje ton evangellos to Iesus Xristos Ios to Zeos: Zues sti
> >> grásanon en ten Êseye profiede:
> >> "Eú, postelo to mú angelo pro to sú prosuebo,
> >> tudon o cadastévase te sú odo
> >> Fuene to cleyontos en ten erieme,
> >> "Etimaste ten odon to cirios,
> >> poyéd ozíos tos tú caminos."
> >>
> >> [...]
> >
> > Welcome back, Jesse, we have been missing you!
>
> Amen.
Thanks to everyone's welcome and compliments! It's good to be back,
and I'm finding the list less chatty than it was last time I was here,
which is good. And gmail makes reading the list a breeze... by far the
best e-mail program I've ever used.
> Certainly interesting - from what I can see, Costanice seems to contain
> some archaic features lost over the other side of the Med in Greece &
> neighboring dialects, e.g. the preposition _en_ survives (replaced by 'es'
>   elsewhere) and, indeed, final -n obviously survived better here   :)
Most of those final n's are actually epenthetic. Final /n/ was lost in
Costanice, just as in *here*'s Greek, but Costanice abhors hiatus at
word-boundaries and so kept the n's where the following word begins
with a vowel. Then that /n/ was generalized to words that originally
had no /n/ at all, becoming a general epenthetic consonant.

I want to finish the text I'm translating right now, and then I'll get
around to posting some phonology and grammar to the list

> I must confess I haven't tried to pick apart the grammar in detail, but it
> seems to retain present participle with adjectival endings unlike modern
> Greek, where it has become an indeclinable gerund. Interesting.
Absolutely. There are active and passive particles, used adjectivally
and in constructing the perfect tenses.

> It seems that eta survives as |e| in Costanice; it was [e:] at the end of
> the Republic & in the early Empire, but appears to have changed to [i]
> sometime between the 2nd & 3rd centuries CE in mainstream Koine. I guess
> the Greek speaking enclave in Spain got separated from their eastern
> cousins relatively early on.
Eta actually does merge with /i/ in final positions, but later changes
turned those i's back into e's. It is true, however, that eta remained
distinct for longer, and didn't otherwise develop the way Greek eta
did *here*.

> I assume one should read the letters in the Castilian manner (e.g. z = /T/
> ) so I was bit surprised by Xristos. Is the initial |x| to be pronounced
> [x]?
|x| is indeed [x]. After waffling several times, I decided to go back
to my original idea and make |x|, not |j|, the default spelling for
/x/, so the first line should be (for example) _ten arxe_ rather than
_ten arje_. The reasons have to do with the history of Nea Illenicia
in IB, which I don't wish to go into here. The only exception to the
rule of pronouncing like Spanish is |c|, which becomes [tS], not [T],
before a front vowel. Pronounced this way, the text begins to sound
more Italian... which is fine. On the other hand, I'm not happy with
so many [tSe]s (spelled |ce|, from Grk _kai_) and I'm trying to think
of a reason to steal the Spanish conjunction _y_. More thinking and
writing to come.

--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com

"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
 - Pedro the Lion

Reply