> On 01/10/2008, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>> On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 21:10, Philip Newton wrote:
>>
>> > On 01/10/2008, Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:
>> > > - what if Greek instead of Latin would have been at the cradle of the
>> > > Romance languages (Greek with French soundchanges etc.)
>> >
>> > That's essentially the premise of Ray's WHAT, isn't it?
>>
>> It is.
>>
>> > (Of which two languages of mine are part, though one of them is only
>> > at the "ideas" stadium - nothing on paper or bytes, yet.)
>>
>> Haven't heard of these projects yet; I'd be interested in
>> learning about them.
>
> The first is Rhaetian (
http://conlang.wunschzetel.de/rhaetian/ ):
> basically Ancient Greek with sound changes from PIE through Common
> Germanic to Modern High German. Spoken in what's now the western half
> of Canton Graubünden, as well as the Canton of St. Gall and the two
> Appenzell.
>
> While working on that, I discovered how surprisingly well the Modern
> Greek alphabet can be used to write Modern German -- you just have to
> get used to a few unusual conventions, but after that it's probably as
> phonetic as the standard Latin orthography.
>
> The second, which I haven't even named yet and which is only an
> embryo, is Greek (probably not Ancient Greek but something more like
> Byzantine from the point of view of what sound changes have already
> taken place) with Romansh sound changes ("Rhaeto-Hellenic" instead of
> Rhaeto-Romance?). It's likely to be spoken in the Engadine and
> Münstertal.
>
> I got the idea after learning a little Romansh before a trip to
> Graubünden. I'd need more information on Romansh sound changes before
> I can start that, though -- and more material on the various standard
> idioms. (I only have a dictionary of the compromise written idiom,
> Rumantsch Grischun.)
>
> I vaguely intend to make it resemble more the eastern Romansh
> varieties (Putèr, Vallader, Jauer) rather than the western ones
> (Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran), partly because front rounded vowels
> are nifty, and those only show up east of the Albula range. I can
> imagine the orthography may be based more on western standards,
> though, partly because I can't think of a good equivalent of the
> writing convention |ch| (to represent [t_s\] < Latin |c| [k].
>
> (Another problem with the fact that so few languages are written in
> the Greek alphabet -- we're not really used to seeing a fairly wide
> variety of sounds represented by one and the same glyph or glyph
> sequence.)
>
> Another nifty idea I have with my Rhaeto-Hellenic is to have at least
> four orthographies for it: one concultural one (written in Greek, of
> course); one Latin one based on Latin orthographies of the Romansh
> idioms *here*, and a Latin and a Cyrillic one based on
> Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. (Since, as I read somewhere, the phoneme
> inventories of Romansh and BCS happen to be nearly exactly the same.
> The main differences, IIRC, was no /N/ in BCS and no /dZ/ in Romansh.)
>
> Cheers,