Re: The Grand Master Plan for Germanech, version 1.0

On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 11:30:56PM -0800, Barry Garcia wrote:
> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >No problem; Romanian never seems to have had this vowel, and it operates
> >in Italian in only a few cases, mostly moribund now.
>
> I decided to develop Montreiano this way as well. Also, s before stops
> went to /S/, so: star - to be, is pronounced /Star/, and spaziu - space is
> /Spaziu/
I also decided against it for Lainesco, at least in the modern forms of the
language. I haven't decided yet whether there never was a prothetic vowel,
or whether there was one that dropped out. I seem to have read that in a lot
of cases the prothetic <e-> in Portuguese is not pronounced, and <s> before
consonants is also pronounced /S/, so that sounds like how Montreiano.

If it is the case that Lainesco once had a prothetic vowel, that vowel would
probably stick around in some cases, e.g.:

Latin {IN HISPANIA} > (intermediate) Lainesco /eni"spajJA/ or /ene"spajJa/ >
/ni"spajJA/ or /ne"spajJA/, written something like {neSpaiña} or
{niSpaiña}. Maybe with an apostrophe, but I'm not sure where I'd put it :)
OTOH, maybe {ne} or {ni} could be allomorphs for {en} in that case. Anyway,
that's similar to how Italian would do it: {in Ispagnia} instead of *{in
Spagnia}.

--
Eric Christopherson, a.k.a. Contrarian Conlanger Rakko ^_^