Re: My new project - comments appreciated

Philip Newton wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:15:23 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>
>
>>Have language unifications ever
>>been done to this extent before and been adopted?
>>
>>
>
>Sounds remarkably like what I've read about how words for Interlingua
>were chosen, and how they determined what form the word should take.
>
>Basically, they took the four languages English, French, Italian, and
>Spanish/Portuguese (treating the last two as one since they are often
>similar) and try to find a consensus root. If they can't, they have a
>look at German and Russian as well, for their Greco-Latin borrowings
>or possibly IE cognates.
>
>Have a look at http://www.interlingua.org/intro1.html , for example.
>
>

The main difference being, I suppose, that in this case it's four
closely related languages, as opposed to three closely related languages
and English. If there's still a tie, maybe Low Saxon would be best.

Incidentally, about the phonology:

If a sound regularly changes in one language to another, the language in
which the sound is kept distinct gets the orthography, and the
'official' pronunciation.  So, as an example - 'th'.  Dutch, 'd', Scots
'th', Frisian 'd'.  While it's a tie, Dutch(and Frisian) confuses the
sound with plain 'd',  so, while that may be a dialectal feature of
Dutch, it will be written 'th'.  And soforth.

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