Re: "New World": Little Russia (Malaja Rus'), Texas

A lot of clippage here, since I'm replying in one fell swoop here.

--- Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> wrote:

[a description of the three Treks of New Russia]

> Then, the language won't be too different from today's mainland
> Russian?
Fundamentally, no.  There may or may not be an emergence of a distinct
form.  I'm thinking along the lines of Brazilian Portuguese or Cajun
French.  The pronunciation is most likely to be divergent; I have the
language altered by influence from mostly German (and to a lesser
degree West Slavic, Scandinavian, French and English).  But the
language is still definitely standard Russian, and there is no
difference (with possibly few exceptions) between Russian-American
orthography and standard pre-1918 writing.

Why pre-1918?  For political reasons, mostly an anti-Bolshevist one.
The Russian-American community (I keep reminding myself this is
fiction, and something of an experiment on "what might've happened
if..." tends to have conservative leanings, in religion, culture,
politics and family and community structure.

> > Well maybe except for all the final
> >hard-signs.
>
> Consider using the hard sign for distinguishing some homonymous
> endings!
Oh yeah, it's necessary at least to mark morphemic boundaries.  In
fact, I change my mind.  Pre-Soviet practice all the way, even with
final Jeru on all the consonant-final words.  But nothing like, say,
marking certain cases with Jus malyj instead of Ja, etc.

(I found a few good websites on Church Slavonic...)

> I see a phonological problem here: these sounds do exist in Russian
> as
> allophones (of [o] and [u] *between* soft consonants). Foreign front
> labialized vowels are perceived as (back) labialized vowels following
> a soft consonant. IMO it's very difficult to build them in the
> system.
No kidding!  You have front rounded allophones?  I think that would be
convenient, since you don't have to move the tongue from back to front
and back again.  And I know that Ja (or A after Che and Shcha) are
fronted before soft consonants (_pjat'_ "five" is [p'&t']).  I found in
my old Romanov dictionary (I wish I didn't lose it when I moved!) that
Cologne has Jë (i.e. Jo) before soft L, and the German name of the city
of course is Köln.  So when and what cases does Russian have front
rounded vowels in-between soft consonants?

> OTOH nothing prevents from introducing new orthographic conventions
> for
> the reflexes of such sounds in borrowings. E. g. <u>, <o> + soft sign
> (like in some Cyrillic-based orthographies used in the Caucasus).
I know that from Chechen.  (In Latin script it's just umlauted vowels.)
 I hate to add additional characters, but I tend to see an umlaut as a
subtype of a letter rather than a new letter, especially in the cases
of French and Spanish accented vowels.  (I don't say the same for
Danish æ, ø or Icelandic ð and þ; it all depends on the language.)

Though the diaeresis in German Umlaut-ism can be used on three
different vowels, these marked vowels are considered separate letters,
even if I disagree.  I've decided not to use it in Texas Russian.
German and French influence would cause all instances of a rounded
vowel between soft consonants to become a front rounded vowel.  Of
course if analyzed by syllable, they turn out to be mere allophones,
not a phonemic development.

(I do think it'll have an interesting sound.  I still don't know how
/a/ and /o/ will neutralize to in unstressed syllables -- I'm leaning
toward a "Shva-kan'je" and just making them have the value of [@].)

> You may think about using the Ukrainian wide/narrow e's.
Since there are Ukrainians and Belarussians in the community, I will
add I/i, U kraktoje, rounded E for them.

> I think the official name for the city will be still a
> transliteration
> (Bush-siti), but colloquially it could be Russified into some Búshevo
> :)
The English name I'd keep, since St. Petersburg is called by its German
name.  An alternative name for this part-suburb part-country town could
be Bushgorod or Bushograd...

And if anybody here wonders how this could be relevant to conlanging,
I'd call this sub-project of mine the development of a con-dilalect or
a con-regional variant.

DaW.

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