Re: [conculture] Names of countries and national languages

On 2007-09-24 andrew wrote:
 > Wordcraft has Burgendan for Burgundians. In The Voyages of
 > Ohtare and Wulfstan Bornholm is called Burgenda land. It
 > looks like a weak noun to me. I can't find any adjectives
 > derived from it. "Burnch" would not be impossible to
 > derive from it.

Thanks for that observation. This means that the Lucal
Inglisc form should indeed be Burgendisc, unless it has
evolved to Burinsc! I'm 80% sure now that the ATL where
borgonze exists is Lucus. there is no reason to needlessly
multiply the ATLs if the thing fits into the one I already
have, right?

Jeff Rollin escreust:
 > In the last episode, (On Sunday 23 September 2007
 > 14:56:54), Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
 >
 >> The question is what to call Borgondesc in English.
 >
 > You may call this a cop-out, but I don't see any reason
 > why you couldn't call it "Borgondesc" in English. There
 > must be hundreds of "small" languages whose names are the
 > same in English as they are in their native language
 > (Ubykh and !Xóö pole-vault to mind), whilst there is
 > precedent in Romance - "Rumantsch" has hardly been
 > Anglicised (!). And the accents and ! in !Xóö are not
 > likely to guide any monolingual English speaker in
 > pronouncing her name as she is spoke (sic).
 >

Apart from the fact that Ubykh is a transliteration of the
Russian rendering of the neighboring Circassians' name of
the language there are three answers to this:
- Firstly Borgondesc in as much as it is a language of
   Europe is likely to have a traditional specifically
   English name. To keep the native name of foreign languages
   is a newfangled practice of 19th and 20th century
   linguists, which doesn't apply to European
   languages.Counterexamples like Sami are due to recent
   changes of practice motivated by political considerations.
- Secondly Borgondesc /,bUrgUn'desk/ is the *Rhodrese* form
   of the name, derived from the early native form
   /'borgon,diska/.ater the speakers of the language would
   have called Borghenzche /'borg@n(d)sk@/, Germanic language
   names being feminine while Romance language names are
   masculine. To use what is supposed to be an inflected form
   of an adjective in a Germanic language in English goes
   counter to my linguistic sensibilities somehow.
- Thirdly the problem exists more in Lucal Inglisc than in
   OTL English, since in Lucal Inglisc the language which
   calls itself Rhodray is naturally called Burgendisc and
   Borgondesc would appear only as a quaint variant spelling
   of the same word /'b3:g@ndIS/. At the same time Borgondesc
   went extinct in the Middle Ages so that only historians
   and linguists would need to make the distinction, and they
   would likely qualify Burgendisc with adjectives like
   Þeedsc and Welsc, or more modernly Germanisc (Lucally
   /'j3:m@nIS/) and Romanisc. That the Lucal Inglisc would
   adopt the Rhodrese or Borgonesc. name in some respelled
   form is unlikely.

So the question of what to call the conlang B. in OTL
English is rather complicated. 'Burgendish' might have
something going for it.


Scotto Hlad skrev:
 > Certainly, Jeff is right, and I struggled with this as
 > well when I was naming Regimonti. Someone on either the
 > Conlang or Romconlang lists had suggested that when
 > working with a Romance language that when there are many
 > of them side by side, they are named by region hence
 > Italian vs. French etc. (Please no flames on this example,
 > it is a generalization) however when it is isolated, it
 > retains it Roman type name, eg the language of the Romans
 > (eg Romanian).

That's true: only Romance languages that were isolated from
other Romance languages kept names derived from Roman(ic)-

 > Sadly, Romansch breaks this rule but as I said it is a
 > generalization.

Not really. Rumantsch has most likely been surrounded by
German(ic) speaking areas for a very long time. In any case
the Others that mattered were German(ic)-speaking.

 > I chose Rumansa as the language in its native form which
 > ended up being very close to the native name of Romansch
 > or one of its dialects (I forget which.)

As others pointed out that's not really a problem. Consider
the names of Latvia(n) and Lithuania(n) in English and other
languages. Heck, even the native words for the two are
similar. I guess they came to think of each other as
different ethnoi rather late!

 > But given that we have differing names in English between
 > the native names (German v. Deutsch) I chose the english
 > name of my conlang for its region. The Romans called the
 > area Regiomontanus which I simplified to Regimonti. The
 > place name in Regimonti is Rejumona. If you want an
 > anglicised name, you may have to think as well what it
 > would be called in other languages as well. I suppose in
 > French Regimonti would be call Régimonte but I"m only
 > guessing as I haven't given that any thought to date.

My problem is that I have both a Germanic language, properly
called Borgenzche/Borgondesc and a romance language spoken
in the same geographical region which is called
Borghendeland/Borgonze, and it is hard to let both languages
have names derived from the same root. I have decided that
the Romance language is after all likely to be called
Rhodray (Rhodrese in English) after the main river of the
land, for similar reasons to those why 'Spanish' is called
Castilian.

Furthermore:

In the course of these considerations it has occurred to me
that Welsc probably means 'of Gaul' in Lucal Inglisc, and
that Cymru is most likely called Bretland, and its
inhabitants Brets. In fact Wales is probably Greater
Bretland and Britany is Lesser Bretland, in older times
Hiþer Bretland and Farþer Bretland or Bretland Overseas.

Funny how one thing leads to another in conculturing and
conlanging...