Intro to Frankish, was Re: A Franco-Turkic a posteriori language

In a message dated 1/8/2005 9:46:36 AM Eastern Standard Time,
geoffhorswood@HOTMAIL.COM writes:

>Browsing through my dictionary the other day, thinking about perhaps trying
>to blend Kazakh and English into a workable conlang, I suddenly noticed how
>many English words were Old French in derivation.
>As I had no idea where in the world I could rationally place my Anglo-
>Turkic speakers, this gave me something of an idea:
>What if one (or more) of the crusader kingdoms somehow came to terms with
>the Seljuk Turks and managed to survive?  What would their language look
>like today?
Funny you should mention Old French-speaking Crusaders; I had been meaning to
post about my own OF-derived Conlang, Frankish, which is spoken in an
alternate history in which the Crusader kingdoms survived to the present day.

(So that you don't think I'm copying you, let me say that I did mention
Frankish on the list once before, and my notes on the subject go back to 2002.)

(I know that the name "Frankish" is also used for a Germanic language, but
since the Crusaders were generally called "Franks" by Middle Easterners, that
seemed like the best name.)

Frankish is still vaguely sketched, but the main things that will distinguish
it from French are:

1.  It retains the neat case system of OF, which had a lot on nouns that
declined like ths:

Nom. sg. = li voisins
Obl. sg. = le voisin
Nom. pl. = li voisin
Obl. pl. = les voisins

where there's only one non-zero ending, -s, but it manages to indicate both
number & case.

2. The vowel system is considerably simplified from OF, as follows:

/i , y / > /i/
/e, 2, E, 9/ > e
/a/ > /a/
/@/ > /@/
/o, O/ > /o/
/u/ > /u/

(One might chalk this up partly to influence from Greek and Arabic, which, if
I'm not mistaken, have much smaller vowel inventories than French.)

3. Frankish will aquire some vocabulary from Greek,  Arabic, & Turkish, but
grammatical influence will be negligible.

 I would appreciate it if people could recommend sources for Old French.  I'm
currently relying on _An Introduction to Old French_, by William Kibler.

I don't have the conhistory worked out, but I figure the modern-day Crusader
Kingdom will include roughly the following areas:

Most of Sinai
Israel/Palestine and adjacent parts of Jordan
Lebanon and adjacent parts of Syria
The bit of Turkey around Antioch
The island of Cyprus

Since the conhistory will take some work, I also intend to work out a
slightly different version of Frankish (which I provisionally call "Frankish-B")
which is spoken in a world much more similar to our own, in which the Crusades
attracted a large number of settlers whose OF-derived language survives to the
present day, but in which there was essentially no effect on political history,
so that the only difference between *there* and *here* is that, *there*,
Israel includes a small number of Frankish-speakers among its linguistic minorities.

Frankish-B would have less influence from Greek, and more from Turkish and
Hebrew, compared to the original Frankish-A.

Suggestions for further development are appreciated.

Doug