Re: New Lang, but Just For Fun

At 5:34 pm -0500 18/1/00, nicole perrin wrote:
[....]
>the long-lost Latin-Japanese pidgin (or creole?  I don't really know my
>terms here)
pidgin - a contact language formed when two different speech communities
attempt to communicate.  A pidgin is no one's first language, and is
characterized by reduced grammatical structure, lexicon and stylistic
range.  Such languages can be very unstable & transitory; but in areas of
economic development, a pidgin can flourish and develop a pretty stable
form like the Anglo-Chinese Pidgin, which gave the noun 'pidgin'.

creole - is a pidgin which has become the native language of a speech
community; in the process of creolization the language will expand its
structural, lexical & stylistic range, so that the creole becomes as
functionally complex as any other natlang.

From your description below, Raatingo is a pidgin.

> spoken by Japanese sailors who ventured out of the Pacific
>and into the Mediterranean to trade with the Romans.
IIRC the was a canal system linking the Nile Delta with the Red Sea  :)

>We all know that
>Japanese trade with the Mediterranean was absolutely booming and that
>Japanese sailors would definitely have had to acquire a minimal
>knowledge of Vulgar Latin in order to get by in Roman colonies.
Indeed - and over in the eastern Med, they'd probably aquire the odd Greek
word or two to add to the mix!

[...]
>
>Not as pretty as Jennifer's Romance lang, but amusing enough.
Au contraire - it looks quite pretty to me.

> Really,
>though, I harbor a secret desire to make a Romance lang spoken in the
>east, maybe somewhere between Romania and Russia, so it can use the
>Cyrillic alphabet.  That would be fun, yeah, it would have lots of
>Slavic inflences too
It's been done :)

Romanian has lots of Slavic influences & was written in Cyrillic before
they changed to the Roman script sometime IIRC in late 19th cent (?).  The
related lang Moldavan (spelling?), which some consider really a dialect of
Romanian, is still written in Cyrillic.

>(read:  retention of case inflection).
IMO you'd need to isolate your Latin-speaking community well before the
case system was collapsing - probably ought to be before the end of the BC
period.  Maybe in the turmoil of the last century BC with all its civil
wars, some group, fed up with it all, upped & migrated to find the better
life, or a whole community got itself exiled and lost contact with the
later Roman world.

You could have real fun with this.  Who knows?  They could even have
finished up on the shores of the New World  :)

>Oh well,
>midterms start tomorrow, and I'd better get to work!
Good luck with the midterms!
Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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