The idea for a conlang derived from Gothic has been in my mind since I first started studying Gothic. Inspired by Ill Bethisad's ill-detailed
Vissi and my class on the history and culture of medieval Spain this semester, I went with Spain as a setting. Its existence is predicated on the Visigoths' doing more to create/expand their own culture, as opposed to adopting wholesale the Roman culture of Spain. I am not yet sure whether they will still convert to Catholicism, but either way, Gothic is more than a liturgical language at the time of the Umayyad invasion. Subsequently, one of the Christian polities that arises in the north is Arian and Gothic-speaking; there are also possibly arabized Gothic-speakers in the south, comparable to the Mozarabs.
Long story short, a descendant of Gothic survives at least into the late medieval period. It is in some ways a
bogolang, in that I started by applying many of the developments from classical Latin characteristic of vulgar Latin to Gothic, but I expanded on things some from there. Much though I love the Gothic alphabet, I adopted the Latin alphabet with spelling conventions that are a mix of the conventions of several of the Iberian languages.
"Phonology" and OrthographyThis is basically just going to be a phoneme inventory — thus the scare quotes.
Plosives: /p b t d k g/ <p b t d c/q g/gu>*
Fricatives: /B f T D s z S Z h/ <v f th dh s z x j/lh** h>
Nasals: /m n J/ <m n nh>
Affricates: /tS dZ/ <c/tx g/dj>º
Other consonants: /l r j/ <l r y>
Vowels: /a e i o O u/ <a e i o u>
Two diphthongs merit attention: /je/ and /we/ are spelled <ie/yeºº> and <ue> respectively.
/g/ is realized as [G] intervocalically
* <q> is used where /k/ descends from Gothic /k_w/; likewise <gu> is used when /g/ descends from Gothic /g_w/
** <lh> is used where /Z/ descends from Gothic /l/; <j> is used otherwise
º <c g> are used for /tS dZ/ when they descend from Gothic /k g/ palatalized before /e i/; <tx dj> are used otherwise
ºº <ye> word-initially, <ie> otherwise
Stress falls on the first syllable, although prepositional verbs (e.g.
aflitha "leave", conjugated
litha af, from Gothic
af-leiþan) are stressed on the first syllable of the root rather than the preposition.
I'm probably missing or overlooking some things — it is sometimes difficult to keep track of things in my notes, especially since I seem not to have removed some sound changes from the Grand Master Plan despite having ignored them later. At any rate. Some words:
mari "ocean" /"mari/
volf "wolf" /"Bolf/
hierdas "shepherds" /"hjerdas/ (probably [Cerdas])
gevos "gifts" /"dZeBos/
griba "grasp" /"griBa/
aflitha "leave" /af"liTa/
I realize this isn't much to go on, but I need to figure out how to present the rest of the information I have.