Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.

From:<kam@...>
Date:Saturday, May 26, 2001, 16:05
On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 11:53:21PM -0400, Padraic Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 25 May 2001, Dan Jones wrote: > > >andrew yscrifef: > > > >> > hog, porch < porcus > >> > >> Yes. > > > >*Please* can we have ill porch -> llo phyrch? Just a few irregular nouns > >would make Brithenig more interesting. > > This is certainly an old argument. I'd certainly like to see irregular > forms all over the place; but the regularity of the nouns at least was > established some years ago. A few irregular verbs have appeared since > I started with Brithenig, though. Perhaps some irregular nounds will > yet be coaxed out. >
Oh dear, I've thrown a bigger spanner into the works than I'd intended. The vowel changing plurals have to be based on the nominative plural of masc. o-stems, i.e. /-i:/ whether you're working from British or Latin. In other words, you have to assume that the nominative plural survived as in Italian, not the accusitive pl. /-o:s/ as in Spanish, French etc. You'd have to assume that your Latin base was different from the vulgar latin of Gaul. Kennith Jackson has of course suggested in LHEB that the Latin that went into Proto-Welsh etc. wasn't the dog-latin of the urban hoi polloi, but a sort of rather correct school Latin used by the rural gentry. This may not stand up to scrutiny "here", but could have happened "there", especially since Londinium was still overrun by the Saxon hords. Certainly it's the nominative rather than the accusative that has survived in Welsh, Cornish and Breton. In Old Irish there was still a nom/acc distinction, when the two cases merged it was generally the accusitive that was lost. If you lose the /-i:/ ending then all you have left to mark plurals is the debris of the various consonant stems -on- -jon- -ow- -nt- -ik- etc. most of which get recycled in WCB. as plural endings. Otherwise you have to depend on a "compulsory" article etc. as in modern French to mark plurality. Languages like Malay seem happy to leave number unmarked most of the time, but European langs usually only allow this in a few words e.g. English "sheep". I'm afraid the vowel change plurals are so much a feature of WCB (and AFAIK Sindarin) than I just expect to find them in any language styled on Welsh etc. From the following they would seem to occur in Kerno and Arvorec, hmmm some very convoluted diaglossae must be involved :-)
> > > >Arvorec has ... and torc'h, as > >"pig" from the Gaulish *torcos, plural týrc'h. >
BTW if you put Quenya through the GMP as someone has suggested, won't you end up with Sindarin?
> Padraic.
Keith

Replies

Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>
Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
andrew <hobbit@...>
BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...>