Re: The Grand Master Plan for Germanech, version 1.0

Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...> writes:

> At 00:17 03/11/01 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >However, I am still rather undecided about this matter.  I have been
> >pondering whether Germanech should develop a prosthetic vowel before
> >initial sC (as in French, Spanish and Brithenig), but as for now, I
> >think not.  So the Germanech word for "school" would be _scul_ [Sul],
> >not something like **escul.
>
> That's something they gained from their Celtic lineage, isn't it?
Might be, though this was not my afterthought.  The idea was simply that
the same changes that transformed West Germanic into High German *here*
happened to the Vulgar Latin dialect of Germania *there*, whatever
caused them.

It is true, however, that the northern boundary of the High German sound
shift is nearly identical with an older Celtic/Germanic linguistic
boundary, and some linguists have tried to explain the shift with a
Celtic substratum, but this is highly controversial and most linguists
don't accept that.  I just applied the changes to Vulgar Latin without
pondering the question what caused them, just assuming that the
conditioning factors - whatever they were - applied *there* as well.

Jörg.