Re: YACL: Thylean (alternate-history)

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

> Here I come delurking, only to prudently blather on about my own new
> projects :) Anyway, hope some of you will like it...
>
Having carefully read this post, yes I do! Welcome in the club of Romance
conlangs inventors :)

>
> THYLEAN
> Genre: alternate Earth
> Family: Romance
> Time: 500 AD
> Location: present day Iceland
> Background:
[snip of the conhistorical background]

Interesting history. I'm just wondering how many people were part of the
Republican faction and if Brutus could have really convinced them to leave their
homeland for an uncertain future... But if he managed to convince Cicero, then
it would be no problem to convince the others... :)

>
> Anyway, here are the details:
>
> PHONOLOGY
>
>
> - Consonants
>
> /p t k/
> /B D G/
> /l m n N r/
> /s S f/
> /w j/
>
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?

> Note the phonemic status of /N/ (through CL [Nn] in 'gn')
>
> Allophones:
>
> /n/ is [N] before velars /k G/
> /G/ is [j] before front vowels /i e/
Interesting.

> /k/ is [hj] (unvoiced semivowel) before /i e/
This one too, quite unusual :) .

> /s/ intervocalic or word final is voiced [z]
> /B/ before /s/ is [p], as in 'absum' [apsum]
>
> Changes CL > Th:
>
> /b d g/ > /B D G/ fricativization
> /pp tt kk/ > /f T x/ (were affricates /pf tT kx/ in mid-stage)
> /bb dd gg/ > /B D G/ (first affricates /bB dD gG/, then merged with /B D
> G/)
> /ll rr nn/ > /Dl Dr Dn/, was [dl, dr, dn] in mid-stage, and remains so
> in
>              some dialects
> /pt/ > [ft]
> /ct/ > [xt]
> /ps/ > [fs]
> /x/ > [xs]
> /gn/ > /N/
> /mn/ > /Bn/ (with atonic vowel deletion, 'nomine' becomes [nOBne]
> /v/ + /o: u:/ (stressed syll. only) > 0 (e.g. 'vos' is [Ouz])
> /j/ + /e:/ (stressed syll. only) > 0
> /sk/ + front vowels > /S/ (as in VL)
> /gl/ > /l/ (was first /Gl/)
>
> (will do for now...)
>
What have become of /T/ and /x/? did they vanish during subsequent sound
changes?

> MORPHOLOGY
>
> The major change I have in mind is the merging of the genitive, dative,
> and
> ablative into one case (don't know what to call it).
Why not oblique? or simply call it dative, it sounds okay to me.

 Dative wasn't
> really
> that much used in CL, compared to the ablative, so they'd be obvious
> targets for merging (especially because they very often were the same in
> form); genitive fits into it because it's extremely little, if at all,
> used
> after prepositions and verbs, while its primary function, marking of
> ownership or relation, could also be covered by dative in CL (and in
> classical grammar in general), e.g. 'filius mihi est' = 'the boys is to
> me'
> = 'the boy's mine'.
>
Pretty much the evolution of VL to Old French.

> A concern of mine is that I'm not entirely sure when the final m dropped
> out in Latin. I thought I saw 1st century AD somewhere, but I could be
> wrong. I'm keeping it in Thylean, for now, until I find out if Brutus &
> co.
> would actually have pronounced it or not.
>
I think not. -m was really weak even at the time of the Republic. Rules of
prosody are there to show it in poetry.

> Thylean declensions have had their doze of analogy. The 2nd decl. nom.
> sing. -os was rejected in favor of the vocative -e, because of the
> former's
> similarity to the established plural endings. This further led to acc.
> sing. -om becoming -em, by analogy. 3rd decl. pl. dat/abl -ibus becomes
> -
> ios, not -ebos, through the elimination of the b, which was
> unconventional
> and outnumbered in the noun declension system.
>
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.

> A sketch (using "Thylean spelling", reflecting vowel changes)
>
>
>                 singular                plural
> 1st decl.
>
> nom             serva                   servae
> acc             servam                  servas
> g/d/a           servae                  servis
>
> 2nd decl.
>
> nom             serve                   servi
> acc             servem                  servus
> g/d/a           servu                   servis
>
> 3rd decl.
>
> nom             rex                     regis
> acc             regem                   regis
> g/d/a           rege                    regios
>
That looks nice, except the keeping of -m.

> 4th decl. merges with 2nd.
> 5th decl. merges with 3rd.
>
The last one sounds unlikely to me. In Republic's times the nouns of 5th decl.
were already merging with the 1st declination (with doublets like luxuries -
luxuria, materies - materia), except dies, fides and res. Those last three could
well be put in the 3rd declination though.

> LEXIS
>
> I'm just getting started, but here is an outline:
>
> The CL suffix '-que' lives a good life in Thylean and is further
> expanded.
> It generally reinforces words here and there. An example of this is a
> change to the pronominal system:
>
> CL 'nos':
>
> nom    nousque
> acc    nous
> g/d/a  noubis
>
> CL 'vos':
>
> nom    ousque
> acc    ous
> g/d/a  oubis
>
> Where the -que suffix is used to add a nom-acc distinction which was not
> present (as Spanish did by having nominative 'nos' > 'nosotros')
>
Nice use of -que. It sounds really neat to me.

> Sample semantic shifts:
>
> CL iam 'already' > Th iam 'now'
> CL nihil 'nothing' > Th nil 'not'
>                         nilquam 'never'
>                         nilque 'none, nothing'
> CL ipse 'him/her/itself' > Th epse 'the' (the Thylean article, though
> not
>                            used nearly as much as in other Romance
> langs)
>
Neat semantic shifts :))) . For an "as for my conlang" digression, I also have a
very interesting semantic shift in "Roumant": The adverbs "mãg": very, much,
many and "mais": more ultimately derive from "magne" (adverb derived from
"magnus": big) and "majus" (adverb derived from "major": bigger). The
resemblance with Latin "magis" (more, gave "mais": but in French and "más": more
and "mas": but in Spanish) only helped this shift, especially as the original
meaning of "magnus" was taken by "grandus".

>
> I think this is by now enough of an introduction. As always, I'd love
> comments; especially if any of you Latin-buffs out there could tell me
> when -m fell out of declensions, and thus if I should retain it in
> Thylean
> or not :)
>
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.

Christophe.