Re: The lost romance tongue

On Jan 28 Padraic Brown wrote:


> >After recently poking aroun the local library, I've come up with a
> >reference to a romance language I've never heard of (and I thought
> >I'd heard of all of them- from Italian to Jerriais): Dalmatian. It is
> >extinct and as far as I know it was spoken in Dalmatia- I think
> >that's somewhere in the Balkans. Does anyone know anything about it?
> >It's related most closely to Romanian- I think.
>
> Well, don't keep us in suspense - was this a reference in passing or
> does your library have a book about Dalmatian? One of my books on
> Romance languages mentions it, but says little about it.
It was in the Brittanica entry for the romance languages. It gave genetic
affiliations, location and that's about it. Since then I have discovered the
numbers one to ten, however: join doi tra kwatro chenk si sapto guapto nu
dik.

<snip>
> >I have created a
> >sub-family in the indo-european group, adding another classical
> >language- Aredos- to the three (or so) we already have.
>
> Does it reside in Europe or Asia (as at least two of them do) or
> elsewhere?
Neither. The speakers of the proto-Carastic tongue originated (putatively)
in what is now eastern Hungary, before the ancestors of the Romans moved
into Italy. It seems that the *Herya (as the proto-Carastans called
themselves - note that the asterisk indicates a reconstructed word) were
sedentary agriculturalists, but they were forced to flee their homeland for
an unrecorded reason. They left our world by magical means and arrived on
the secondary world of Cædha (oddly, Cædha has the same constellations as
Earth does, and is virtually indistinguishable from Earth in environment and
climate).

Here the Aria - as the name *Herya had become - founded their chief city,
Carasta, and founded a continent-spanning empire, centred upon the Cendos
subcontinent. This was about two thousand, seven hundred years ago.

"Aredos" itself refers only to the language, not the people. It means "the
harmonious", similar to the meaning of Sanskrit: "the perfected".

A quick example, displaying the mediopassive and the passive:
daeros moigator, ca con illom moigamosae "Times change, and we are changed
with them".

Dan