Re: Costanice Phonology Sketch

> > From this point on the language was heavily
> > influence by Spanish. About 150 years later their descendants began to
> > emmigrate to South America where, after some oppression and a few
> > failed revolutions, they eventually got their own state speaking their
> > offshoot of Greek, now called Costanice ( < konstantinike:).
>
> Why didn't this group of people simply become assimilated to
> the local culture, as the real Greeks who fled to Italy did?
They need to survive as an enclave in Spain (well, *there* Aragon) for
only about 150 years, which seems completely possible--there are
Chinatowns and other such enclaves in the US which have existed for at
least that long. Once they start emigrating to America things are
easier, because they set up monolingual Costanico villages and cities.
In the colony the Aragonese set up in the New World, the Costanicos
were a minority, but in the regions that eventually broke away they
were majority. The groups that remained in Spain, OTOH, were
eventually assimilated.

> And why does this Greek change so much from the Renaissance
> until now?  In real life, languages that separated even 1000
> years ago tend to look very, very similar.  Obviously language
> contact is involved here, so things might be different.
It does not change _that_ much, no more than *here*s Spanish did. Most
of the changes distinguishing this dialect from what we know as Greek
precede the break, which is why I mentioned the dialectical
difference. The real linguistic point of departure has to lie in the
1st or 2nd centuries, when these Asian Greek dialects start going a
different direction from what *here*s Greek did.

> I do not mean the following as a criticism of your project, but
> something I've never understood about certain historical projects
> like this and Brithenig is the idea that the substrate language
> (Latin or, here, Greek) would be so influenced by some other language
> that it would not just adopt hundreds or thousands of the adstrate's
> lexical items, but also adopt its Lautgesetze, too.  To me, unless
> special circumstances are involved, it seems more likely that such
> a heavy influence would merely kill off the substrate, rather than
> change it to look more like the adstrate.
Well, in this case, some of the changes that chronologically must have
occurred before the move to Spain are still contrived to create
Spanish-like output. But that's my prerogative as the language creator
:).

--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com

"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
- Pedro the Lion


--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com

"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
 - Pedro the Lion