Re: YACL: Thylean (alternate-history)

En réponse à Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>:

> Thanks to all for positive comments,
>
You're welcome!

>
> My sudden interest in Latin is due to the fact that I'm studying it at
> school. I've studied it before, but that was in class, where nothing is
> ever accomplished. Now I'm a, what's it called, a out-of-school-student,
> i.e. I do my studies on my own. That way I can finally use the time I'd
> waste in classes to actually learn stuff. So, I'm all crazy for
> Classical
> Latin and wanted to make a conlang out of it that wouldn't just be Y A
> Romance Lang. Which could best be accomplished by having the conlang
> separate from the Latin community before the VL stage really takes off.
> Such as Sardinian kind of did (that's a funny Romance lang - check it
> out
> if you haven't).
Do you know an URL where I can see some grammatical stuff about Sardinian? It's
not the only time I hear that Sardinian is really a funny Romance tongue, but I
could never check it out by myself (and grammar books are right now far too
expensive for my bank account :(( ).

>
> Before I read the replies to my post, I'd already consulted an excellent
> French book on Latin's phonological history, qui s'appelle "La
> phonétique
> historique du latin". There I had my suspicions on the final m
> confirmed.
> So lots of things need to be rethought, though I was quite prepared to
> drop
> the final m from the beginning. It strikes me how deceptive CL spelling
> actually was, i.e. that lots of words weren't actually pronounced as
> they
> were written. I don't know what to make of it, if I should start
> pronouncing CL more correctly, which might make my fellow students and
> my
> teacher balk, or just read literally anyway.
>
Just read literally, at least at school :) . But when you're at home, do what
you like, just like me :)) .

> I particularly liked Cristophe's positive feedback - merci Cristophe! :)
>
You're welcome :)

> On Mon, 6 Nov 2000 16:23:17 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
> <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> >Having carefully read this post, yes I do! Welcome in the club of
> Romance
> >conlangs inventors :)
>
> It's an honour :)
>
:)) Padraic, Andrew, Barry, myself and of course all the other ones that I'm
forgetting are kindly inviting you to the ceremony of acceptance in the Romance
Conlangers' Society :)))))

> >
> >Interesting, no voiced stops, no voiceless /P T x/, /f/ but /B/. I'm
> wondering
> >about the stability of such a distribution. What do you all think?
>
> You're right. I've rethought this:
>
> /p t k/
> /v D G/
> /l m n N r/
> /f T s S x/
> /j/
>
> As you noted below, /T/ and /x/ should also be phonemes, so they're
> included. I decided that /B/ appeared only in transition, but then
> shifted
> to pair with /f/. /w/ subsequently merged with /v/, as it has widely
> done
> in Spanish AFAIK.
>
And in Old French. /w/ was subsequently reintroduced in the language later,
mostly in contact with Frankish.

>
> I'd rather not call it oblique, as acc is not included in it. Dative is
> fine yes. Perhaps 'relative'? (seems to describe the common theme of
> gen/dat/abl together)
>
Nice name, you could go for it or have a few prescriptivist grammarians in your
Thyle who would keep the name "dative" to keep the link with their Latin
ancestry :)) .

> >Pretty much the evolution of VL to Old French.
>
> Interesting...tell me more!
>
The reduction of cases between VL and Old French didn't come from sound changes
(even if the sound changes like /u/ -> /o/ and /i/ -> /e/, as well as the
disappearance of the -m of the accusative, helped a lot), but more from common
uses between cases. First the vocative disappeared completely in favor of the
nominative, the ablative in favor of the accusative (by neutralisation of the
difference between UBI and QUO, difference marked by prepositions instead of
cases), the genitive was absorbed by the dative (because of their common uses)
while the dative, mostly identical to the ablative and thus to the accusative,
finally merged with the latter, leaving only the opposition
nominative-accusative (called "subject" and "regime" cases). Also, some
reamenagements took place: 1st decl. nom. pl. -ae became -as (identical to the
accusative, that's why in Old French feminine nouns didn't mark the distinction
in case in plural), 3rd decl. nom pl. -es became -i (by alignment to the 2nd
decl., as if a distinction which was not made anymore by feminine words had to
be made by masculine ones). It finally led to a system where the only mark of
case (except some radical changes depending on the accent and other sound
changes) was -s, used sometimes in strange ways. For instance, the type "murs":
wall:
                  sing.      plur.
Subject case:     murs       mur
Regime case:      mur        murs

Strange isn't it? And for other types of nouns it's generally worse :)) . You
can easily understand why such a system didn't last long :)) (if the two cases
had been marked better, they surely would have stayed a lot longer :) ).

> >Why not the common /ae/ -> /as/ replacement of the 1st decl. nom. pl.?
> Wasn't it
> >already appearing in Caesar's time in spoken Latin? Or maybe /ae/ ->
> /e/, I
> >don't remember seeing a sound change of /ae/ in your phonology.
>
> Actually, I didn't have any sound change for /ai/, except I merged /oi/
> with it. But you're right, I don't like /ai/ as an ending. Nom. pl. in
> -as?
> That might just be it...yes, it's all forming in my mind now... nom. pl.
> of
> 1st and 2nd declensions shall be -as and -us, the same as the
> accusatives.
> No plural will make distinction between nom and acc...ok, read on, I'll
> summarize below...
>
Not far from Old French, as I explained :) .

>
> I kind of like the super-vocative idea, but only for animates. Seeing an
> inanimate in vocative form just looks too silly to me. Final m is gone,
> so
> let's review:
>
>                              Sing.        Pl.
> 2nd decl (animate)
>
> nom                         serve       servus    'male slave'
> acc                         servo       servus
> rel                         servu       servis
>
> 2nd decl (inanimate)
>
> nom                         ladio       ladius    'sword'
> acc                         ladio       ladius
> rel                         ladiu       ladis
>
I like the fact that neuter nouns keep in singular the same feature as in Latin:
they don't mark the difference between nominative and accusative.

> 1st decl
>
> nom                         serva       servas    'female slave'
> acc                         serva       servas
> rel                         serva       servis
>
He he, it seems that Thylean is like Old French in considering that feminine
nouns don't need as many distinctions as masculine nouns :)) .

> 3rd decl
>
> nom                         neave       neavis    'ship'
> acc                         neave       neavis    (/æ/ from CL /a:/
> rel                         neavi       neavios    is spelled 'ea')
>
> Obviously, the acc is by now only rarely distinctive from the nom, in
> fact
> only in 2nd decl animates. Yet those aren't that rare at all, and I
> think
> the distinction could reasonably thrive, as mostly an animate-inanimate
> distinction.
>
I agree. If you keep the three genders, then the nominative and accusative
should stay different. But you could also think of a later development of
Thylean where neuter nouns would be abandoned, merging with masculine nouns. In
this case, the nominative and accusative would certainly merge too, and you
would have a neat two-case system: nom.-acc., and relative. So direct
participants of the verb (subject and object) would be marked the same way,
while indirect participants (and possessors :) ) would have another marking.
Seems very reasonable to me :) .

>
> >I think it would be wiser to drop it from the declensions, unless some
> kind of
> >hypercorrection (maybe due to some partisan of purity of language like
> Cicero)
> >would put it back in use. That's unlikely, but not impossible.
>
> I intented to make this a puritan kind of Latin, but I'm kind of
> digressing
> from that, with really simple declensions and all...
>
Still, you could try and keep puritanity for the conjugations :))) (imagine:
keeping the old Latin future forms :) ).