Re: Proto-Romance

On Saturday, March 20, 2004, at 05:13 AM, Paul Bennett wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:14:38 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
> wrote:
>
>> 1. What is the name of the closest common ancestor of the Romance
>>    languages?  Romance?  Proto-Romance?  Late Vulgar Latin?
[snip]

> There's a romconlang group on Yahoo! Groups. They'll have your answers.
>
> I suspect the "normal" starting point is Vulgar Latin,
I don't understand why normal is quoted. Vulgar Latin is the only starting
point for the Romance languages; it's what they're descended from.
Proto-Romance is the Vulgar Latin of the late Empire, say about 4th to 6th
cent CE., but it derives naturally from the Vulgar of the earlier
centuries.

I understand Mark's aim to to build up info for a PIE conlang and it seems
to me the spoken language as as far as we can reconstruct is going to be
more relevant.

> but there's no
> reason you couldn't start from Classical, or even Proto-Latin-Falliscan.
Depends what you want to do. If you wanted to work forward to now, then
you would have to have a considerably different alternate history in a
parallel universe (like Brithenig does). But for working backwards, as a
assume Mark is, they would indeed also be useful.

One must bear in mind that Classical Latin was essentially a literary
_conlang_ created from Vulgar Latin under the influence of literary Greek.
  It was probably at no time anyone's L1, tho we assume the Senatorial
classes would've approximate to it at least on formal occasions. It did,
of course, have a derivative, namely Medieval Latin which was for
centuries a living & developing auxiliary L2. Classical Latin is a useful
tool in reconstructing the past history if used with Vulgar Latin & the
realization of its artificial nature and Greek influence.

Proto-Latin-Faliscan is indeed useful in working back towards to PIE as it
attempts to reconstruct an earlier form of an Italian IE language group.

> I
> don't think I know of a Proto-LF-derived Conlang, it might be an
> interesting project.
Yes, but as I said it would need an alternate universe in which PLF could
have survived as a unit and not given way to Latin & Faliscan in a world
where Latin came to dominate and caused Faliscan as well as many other
languages to become extinct.

Ray
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