Re: Proto-Romance

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 07:48:48PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> But he also spoke of a PIE conlang, so I had assumed he was wanting to see
> how changes had occurred along the way from PIE to modern French, Spanish,
>  Italian etc., i.e. working forward from VL to modern Romance langs and
> working backwards from VL to PIE.
Indeed, I *will* be looking in both directions.

Basically the set of I-E languages is so large and so far removed from
the ancestor that I can't get a handle on IE-ness, so I thought I'd
start smaller.  So, step 1: generate a typical, boring, this-side-of-VL
Romance conlang to get my feet wet and get some practice at emulating
linguistic evolution.  Step 2: start over, using P-I-E instead of VL as
a base, and go in a different direction.


> 1. The changes typical of the Romance group are not universal; it would be
> worth IMO looking at the changes in some other IE derived sub-families
Absolutely.    Later. :)

> 2. There have been influences from other non-Romance langs in the
> development of the modern Romancelangs, but Mark's IE speakers have been
> isolated from any such influences.
True.  But the different Romancelangs have had different - in some cases
very different - external influences, such as the Slavic effect on
Rumanian.  So I'm hoping I'll be able to factor those out and identify
a core of Romanceness.

> If so, then the language is likely to remain pretty conservative IMO - cf.
>  insular Icelandic as opposed to the Norse of the mainland which has given
> Swedish, Norwegian & Danish. The contrast between the latter 3 and
> Icelandic is quite noticeable.
True.  My hypothesis is that

1. over time even an isolated language will show changes,

2. over enough time (thousands of years), these changes can be quite
   severe

3. therefore if the population of speakers fragments, then after that
   same "enough" time the fragments will speak mutually unintelligible
   languages.

-Mark

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