Re: Hellenic languages in the WHAT (was Re: [relay] Another relay soon, with start-text in Ithkuil)

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,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Reply