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My new project - comments appreciated

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 13, 2004, 18:46
Interested by the more wide-ranging language-unification projects I've
seen, I've decided to make one.  It sounds like fun.

It shall be called 'Anglo-Netherlandic'(as a stopgap, until I can find a
better name).  Essentially, its job shall be to unify English, Frisian,
Scots, and Dutch.  An impossible task, you may say, but o ye of little
faith.  Let me demonstrate.

Let's take an evidently different from English example.  We have 'to
know' as one verb.  Dutch has two('weten' and 'kennen').  How do we
resolve this dilemma?  Simple, we take the opinions of the minority
languages (Frisian and Scots).  Scots has 'wat' and 'ken' - a vote for
the Dutch system, as does Frisian - 'kenne' and 'witte'.  So, we know
that the two verb system is the majority opinion.  We also know that it
would have 'ken' as the root.

We continue to do this, for most features where they disagree.  As for
phonological differences, we compromise.  For instance 'old' is written
'al/d', where 'l/' represents [L]~[w](probably the former in standard
language, the latter in colloquial.

So - is this anywhere near possible?  Have language unifications ever
been done to this extent before and been adopted?

Replies

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>