Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by MisterBernie »

I think another reason may be that the best and widely, freely available resources tend to be about IE langs, and Latin and its descendants are among the best established, so it's easy to have clear roots and structures to derive a descendant from, unlike if you wanted to make, let's say, West Mediterranean Finnic.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by roninbodhisattva »

MisterBernie wrote:...unlike if you wanted to make, let's say, West Mediterranean Finnic.
This would be delicious.

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Ouagadougou »

The intent of my posting this category was not to glorify the freakish or bizarre "romlang" that may stretch the limits of the term. I have merely found that the majority of romlangs are poorly designed or implemented, and lack any sort of appeal. This is not to say that a Spanish-esque romlang with French-esque grammar would be uninteresting, but rather that because there are so many of them, the ones that deviate meaningfully from the majority are usually the ones that attract my specific attention.

That being said, Mediterranean Finnic would be quite a sight; I don't know why they would come so far from Finland, though. Maybe some sort of Hungarian thing would be more plausible, although verisimilitude in conhistory is a moot point. Finnic with Greek, Turkish, and Arabic influences?

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by MisterBernie »

Ouagadougou wrote:I don't know why they would come so far from Finland, though.
Liik tem-karsui tem-apamaass
[ˈliːk tɛŋˈkːarsuɪ̯ temˈapamaːsː]
excess DEF-bear-PART DEF-father-land-LOC
Too many bears in the homeland.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Ouagadougou »

Here's a thought: maybe the bears felt alienated by the growing population of Finns, and migrated south in a mass exodus until they reached the balmy Mediterranean island of Cyprus (Bears can fly) where they drove out the pesky Cypriots and developed a Finno-Ursic-Romance-Hellenic-Semitic language, replete with rhoticization of vowels!

Sample sentence:

Urrr arurr grar!
It's time to eat!

Note the triconsonantal roots and the -ar verb in the first conjugation.

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by MisterBernie »

Valleet karsumest! Tem-kupruchenkarsut inchalanvitun!
[ˈβɑlːɛːt ˈkɑrsumɛst | tɛŋˈkːupruʃɛnkɑrsut ˈinʃɑlɑnβitun]
Beary lies! Damned bears of Cyprus!
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Ouagadougou »

Grra!
Yes!

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Dewrad »

MisterBernie wrote:I think another reason may be that the best and widely, freely available resources tend to be about IE langs, and Latin and its descendants are among the best established, so it's easy to have clear roots and structures to derive a descendant from, unlike if you wanted to make, let's say, West Mediterranean Finnic.
And that is exactly why most Romlangs tend to be shit. Or "quirky" for the sake of being so. It seems to me that creators of Romlangs really fall into two camps: those who love the Romance languages and want to do something Romance (and so research Vulgar Latin, the diachronics of Romance natlangs, et hoc genus omne) and those who just want the raw materials for a diachronic conlang. The latter create lovingly-crafted, verisimilitudinous "this could actually be a Romance natlang" conlangs, while the former just let rip with whatever they feel like. (You can probably guess which group I fall in myself- Romlanging is something I tend to get quite aerated about.)


Of course, there's the third group. They're the ones who apply implausible soundchanges to a couple of phonemes and do their best to retain Classical Latin's passive inflections. The equivalent in IE conlangs are those who simply have to retain PIE's laryngeals.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by jmcd »

Are you sure you didn't say "latter" and "former" the wrong way round? :S

Anyway, if people want to do something outlandish with a Romance language, they could create a creole rather than something implausible.

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by WeepingElf »

Dewrad wrote:
MisterBernie wrote:I think another reason may be that the best and widely, freely available resources tend to be about IE langs, and Latin and its descendants are among the best established, so it's easy to have clear roots and structures to derive a descendant from, unlike if you wanted to make, let's say, West Mediterranean Finnic.
And that is exactly why most Romlangs tend to be shit. Or "quirky" for the sake of being so. It seems to me that creators of Romlangs really fall into two camps: those who love the Romance languages and want to do something Romance (and so research Vulgar Latin, the diachronics of Romance natlangs, et hoc genus omne) and those who just want the raw materials for a diachronic conlang. The latter create lovingly-crafted, verisimilitudinous "this could actually be a Romance natlang" conlangs, while the former just let rip with whatever they feel like. (You can probably guess which group I fall in myself- Romlanging is something I tend to get quite aerated about.)
The problem with romlangs, IMHO, is that there is only a narrow margin between being uninteresting (by being just the same as the Romance languages we have) and being implausible (by applying unlikely changes to Vulgar Latin, often by virtue of an out-of-the-way substratum such as Bantu or Algonquian), so it is damn hard to do a romlang "right", and most romlangs on the market just suck. There isn't really much of interest that can be extracted from the framework of the Romance group of languages without raising the "How could that beast emerge from Vulgar Latin?" question.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by brandrinn »

I assume you got your "former" and "latter" mixed up, Dewrad? But otherwise I agree 100%.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Dewrad »

brandrinn, jmcd: you're right, I did. :oops:
Some useful Dravian links: Grammar - Lexicon - Ask a Dravian
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Salmoneus »

And speaking for the unconventionals: what's so wonderful - so compulsory - about copying French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Romanian? Those languages already exist. While it's very admirable I suppose to be able to do that, and some of these romlangs even seem quite nice and occasionally interesting - I'd far rather see something novel. There's no law that says that Latin had to evolve the way it did and only the way it did. There is, for instance, no reason why case could not have survived (though given the trend toward prepositions, I think it's fair to say that a LARGE case system would be unlikely to survive). [Likewise: in PIE, the laryngeals could have survived, and indeed did, not only in Anatolian, but in several other branches as well. As it happens they were all lost eventually, but there's nothing magic about a sound labelled 'laryngeal' that means it must disappear by dawn/485 AD.]
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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Salmoneus wrote:And speaking for the unconventionals: what's so wonderful - so compulsory - about copying French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Romanian? Those languages already exist. While it's very admirable I suppose to be able to do that, and some of these romlangs even seem quite nice and occasionally interesting - I'd far rather see something novel. There's no law that says that Latin had to evolve the way it did and only the way it did. There is, for instance, no reason why case could not have survived (though given the trend toward prepositions, I think it's fair to say that a LARGE case system would be unlikely to survive). [Likewise: in PIE, the laryngeals could have survived, and indeed did, not only in Anatolian, but in several other branches as well. As it happens they were all lost eventually, but there's nothing magic about a sound labelled 'laryngeal' that means it must disappear by dawn/485 AD.]
You're right there's no law that, say, cases have to disappear or velars have to change before front vowels. But these are common areal features. Creating a language that has these things makes the language feel more appropriate to its terroire. You don't have to go that way, but if you completely disregard these features and strike off in another direction entirely, the question becomes: why are you making a Romlang in the first place? Just make an isolate or some a priori creation. Why would you deliberately place a language within a given linguistic heritage and then ignore everything that makes that heritage interesting? I think what Dewrad and I are saying is not incompatible with your desire for novelty. It's just that we want languages that (far from "copying" French or Italian) sound like they could realistically have evolved sandwiched between such languages for centuries.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by WeepingElf »

brandrinn wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:And speaking for the unconventionals: what's so wonderful - so compulsory - about copying French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Romanian? Those languages already exist. While it's very admirable I suppose to be able to do that, and some of these romlangs even seem quite nice and occasionally interesting - I'd far rather see something novel. There's no law that says that Latin had to evolve the way it did and only the way it did. There is, for instance, no reason why case could not have survived (though given the trend toward prepositions, I think it's fair to say that a LARGE case system would be unlikely to survive). [Likewise: in PIE, the laryngeals could have survived, and indeed did, not only in Anatolian, but in several other branches as well. As it happens they were all lost eventually, but there's nothing magic about a sound labelled 'laryngeal' that means it must disappear by dawn/485 AD.]
You're right there's no law that, say, cases have to disappear or velars have to change before front vowels. But these are common areal features. Creating a language that has these things makes the language feel more appropriate to its terroire. You don't have to go that way, but if you completely disregard these features and strike off in another direction entirely, the question becomes: why are you making a Romlang in the first place? Just make an isolate or some a priori creation. Why would you deliberately place a language within a given linguistic heritage and then ignore everything that makes that heritage interesting? I think what Dewrad and I are saying is not incompatible with your desire for novelty. It's just that we want languages that (far from "copying" French or Italian) sound like they could realistically have evolved sandwiched between such languages for centuries.
Right. The linguistic landscape of the real world is not a crazy quilt where typologically utterly different languages sit side by side on a small scale. Rather, there are more or less large areas in which all languages are in some way similar to each other, and for which certain features are typical. For instance, there is no Romance language with the kind of tone system we find in Chinese because such tone systems are characteristic of an area that is far removed from the former Roman Empire, and do not occur anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. The range of linguistic structures found in the area where we can expect Romance languages to exist is limited. A Romance language with Chinese-like tones may be an entertaining concept, but barring a Roman conquest of China (or a Chinese conquest of Rome) in an alternative timeline there is no way to get there (frankly, even such a conquest is not really likely to result in a Sino-Romance language - the effect of military conquests on the languages of the conquered peoples is often overrated).

Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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WeepingElf wrote:Right. The linguistic landscape of the real world is not a crazy quilt where typologically utterly different languages sit side by side on a small scale. Rather, there are more or less large areas in which all languages are in some way similar to each other, and for which certain features are typical. For instance, there is no Romance language with the kind of tone system we find in Chinese because such tone systems are characteristic of an area that is far removed from the former Roman Empire, and do not occur anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. The range of linguistic structures found in the area where we can expect Romance languages to exist is limited. A Romance language with Chinese-like tones may be an entertaining concept, but barring a Roman conquest of China (or a Chinese conquest of Rome) in an alternative timeline there is no way to get there (frankly, even such a conquest is not really likely to result in a Sino-Romance language - the effect of military conquests on the languages of the conquered peoples is often overrated).

Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
Right, so let's make an altlang where the Mongol fleets didn't meet storms on the way to Japan, and thus Japan got integrated into Chinese empires from the Yuan dyanasty onward. What kind of Sinitic language would develop in Japan, with Japanese and Ainu influences?
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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Ollock wrote:Right, so let's make an altlang where the Mongol fleets didn't meet storms on the way to Japan, and thus Japan got integrated into Chinese empires from the Yuan dyanasty onward. What kind of Sinitic language would develop in Japan, with Japanese and Ainu influences?
Oh man, I wish I knew more about Old/Middle Chinese. :( I'd be on that like something that's really on something else.

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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Ollock wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Right. The linguistic landscape of the real world is not a crazy quilt where typologically utterly different languages sit side by side on a small scale. Rather, there are more or less large areas in which all languages are in some way similar to each other, and for which certain features are typical. For instance, there is no Romance language with the kind of tone system we find in Chinese because such tone systems are characteristic of an area that is far removed from the former Roman Empire, and do not occur anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. The range of linguistic structures found in the area where we can expect Romance languages to exist is limited. A Romance language with Chinese-like tones may be an entertaining concept, but barring a Roman conquest of China (or a Chinese conquest of Rome) in an alternative timeline there is no way to get there (frankly, even such a conquest is not really likely to result in a Sino-Romance language - the effect of military conquests on the languages of the conquered peoples is often overrated).

Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
Right, so let's make an altlang where the Mongol fleets didn't meet storms on the way to Japan, and thus Japan got integrated into Chinese empires from the Yuan dyanasty onward. What kind of Sinitic language would develop in Japan, with Japanese and Ainu influences?
Probably the same sort of Sinitic language we see in Baghdad or Moscow. Korea was a tribute state of China for centuries but is no more affected linguistically than Japanese is (well, maybe a little actually).
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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brandrinn wrote:
Ollock wrote:Right, so let's make an altlang where the Mongol fleets didn't meet storms on the way to Japan, and thus Japan got integrated into Chinese empires from the Yuan dyanasty onward. What kind of Sinitic language would develop in Japan, with Japanese and Ainu influences?
Probably the same sort of Sinitic language we see in Baghdad or Moscow. Korea was a tribute state of China for centuries but is no more affected linguistically than Japanese is (well, maybe a little actually).
Well, I suppose the conquest would have be more aggressive and with more control than China had over Korea. Perhaps push the conquest back a bit, also, to give more time for Chinese to start actually settling in Japan and establish their culture (AFAIK, Taiwanese is still mutually intelligible with Southern Min after nearly 400 years, granted they have had fresh migrations from the mainland at several points in history).
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

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brandrinn wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:And speaking for the unconventionals: what's so wonderful - so compulsory - about copying French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Romanian? Those languages already exist. While it's very admirable I suppose to be able to do that, and some of these romlangs even seem quite nice and occasionally interesting - I'd far rather see something novel. There's no law that says that Latin had to evolve the way it did and only the way it did. There is, for instance, no reason why case could not have survived (though given the trend toward prepositions, I think it's fair to say that a LARGE case system would be unlikely to survive). [Likewise: in PIE, the laryngeals could have survived, and indeed did, not only in Anatolian, but in several other branches as well. As it happens they were all lost eventually, but there's nothing magic about a sound labelled 'laryngeal' that means it must disappear by dawn/485 AD.]
You're right there's no law that, say, cases have to disappear or velars have to change before front vowels. But these are common areal features. Creating a language that has these things makes the language feel more appropriate to its terroire. You don't have to go that way, but if you completely disregard these features and strike off in another direction entirely, the question becomes: why are you making a Romlang in the first place? Just make an isolate or some a priori creation. Why would you deliberately place a language within a given linguistic heritage and then ignore everything that makes that heritage interesting? I think what Dewrad and I are saying is not incompatible with your desire for novelty. It's just that we want languages that (far from "copying" French or Italian) sound like they could realistically have evolved sandwiched between such languages for centuries.
Case survived in French for centuries - and then disappeared despite being adjacent to case-having languages. Why couldn't a Romlang in, say, the Netherlands, have retained Old French-style cases, or even expanded the case system under the influence of the surrounding germanic languages (cf Romanian)? Palatalisation of velars isn't even universal within MODERN romlangs! So how on earth can it be wrong to include such a feature in a conromlang? And when in the hell was it decreed that romlands had to be situated on the french-italian border? Sure, if your romlang is sited in Andorra, you might want to borrow a lot from Spanish and French. But if your romlang is set in, say, Senegal (the romans didn't conquer carthage until later, allowing the carthaginians to expand their trading colonies in africa, allowing romans to go conquer them later for the sake of completeness (and lower prices on their african goods) allowing a romlang to develop there after the empire fell), I don't see why 'sandwiching the language between French and Italian' is so important.
[If you want to sandwich your language between french and italian, why even bother? There's already a dozen or more romlangs sandwiched between french and italin. Why is this pointless little obsession somehow more legitimate than anyone else's pointless little obsession].

Why create a novel a posteriori conlang? Gee, I don't know, I guess you're right, this really is a total waste of time with no real-life applications. Not like creating an a priori language, or a language sandwiched between French and Italian, which make so much objective sense by all objective and universal criteria. I don't see why I didn't realise before that I'd been wasting my life on things that don't matter to you. A hint: I create a posteriori conlangs NOT because I believe there's a divine commandment to create more languages sandwiched between italian and french, but because I enjoy it. And I think it's interesting. It's a wholly different process from creating an a priori language. With a romlang, the focus is on, for me, diachronics, and knowing the parent language and the sister languages is part of the point!

The rest of the time, this board is all for decrying repetitious yet-another-standard-average-european-language conlanging. But when it comes to romlangs, oh, woe betide anyone who does anything other than adjust most delicately two or three micrometre variables in the continuum between two more-or-less-identical-already romance languages!

Right. The linguistic landscape of the real world is not a crazy quilt where typologically utterly different languages sit side by side on a small scale. Rather, there are more or less large areas in which all languages are in some way similar to each other, and for which certain features are typical.
With a huge number of exceptions. And with plenty of room outside the quilt.
For instance, there is no Romance language with the kind of tone system we find in Chinese because such tone systems are characteristic of an area that is far removed from the former Roman Empire, and do not occur anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. The range of linguistic structures found in the area where we can expect Romance languages to exist is limited. A Romance language with Chinese-like tones may be an entertaining concept, but barring a Roman conquest of China (or a Chinese conquest of Rome) in an alternative timeline there is no way to get there (frankly, even such a conquest is not really likely to result in a Sino-Romance language - the effect of military conquests on the languages of the conquered peoples is often overrated).
On the particular point: there have been tonal languages in Europe, and there still are - a simple tonal romlang would hardly be surprising (particularly in, say, Denmark, or Britain). And complicated tonal systems are just a sahara away - a sahara which the romans did cross by land, and which the carthaginians had crossed by sea, in force. So, with the Senegal example: why couldn't a Senegalese romlang have tone?

On the general point: if centum IE languages didn't exist, you'd be busily telling everybody that they were impossible. If one tonal romlang existed, you wouldn't be able to tell people that was impossible either. If you take out Sardinia and southern Italy, you wouldn't have romlangs with initial mutations, or with retroflex plosives and fricatives (wait, doesn't Asturian have them too?), or without palatalisation, or maintaining the classical latin vowel system, and so on and so forth. but you can't tell people not to do those, because those things are real. If Spanish didn't exist, I suppose you'd be warning people about the impossibility of a romlang with /T/. But if those things can be real, in real romlangs, why can't other things be real, in real romlangs?

Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Rui »

brandrinn wrote:You don't have to go that way, but if you completely disregard these features and strike off in another direction entirely, the question becomes: why are you making a Romlang in the first place?
To practice diachronic conlanging without having to actually create a functional language first. Maybe some people have interesting ideas about sound changes or grammar changes, and want to test them out. Of course you could choose some other existing proto-language (and I would be the first to encourage that, since I agree that Romlangs are overdone and often poorly done), but as has been mentioned by myself and others, Latin has the most widely available resources, and apart from maybe Classical Greek and even less frequently Sanskrit and Classical Chinese, is the only classical language actually formally taught, at least in the West. Therefore, it is the most accessible to people. On the other hand, you'd have to be absolutely dead-set on creating a descendant of Proto-Germanic or the ancestor of Bantu languages or something, to actually put in the effort to go out and find the resources available for those language, assuming adequate resources exist to actually create a functional daughterlang.

Or maybe there are people who are just as interested in Romance languages and Latin as you and Dewrad, but think it would actually be fun to do something "unkosher" in the context of traditional Romance languages. The horror!

Why do people have to have a reason to create a conlang?
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Rui »

WeepingElf wrote:Also, most if not all of the more plausible choices (and many of the less plausible ones) are already taken. A Romance language of Britain? Brithenig. A Romance language of Germany? Germanech. A Romance language of the former Roman possessions in Africa? Carrajina. Of course, you can create a new one for each, but why? It is no longer 1996, when Andrew Smith could sail into blue water with Brithenig. It is 2011, and Romance conlangs are overdone.
This is ludicrous. Why do these particular Romlang creators get "dibs" on the "plausible choices" for althistories? Yes, they were created first, but they are by no means the holders of exclusive rights to those regions. Sure, newer ones would probably be similar, but Welsh, High German, and whatever the substrate for Carrajina is, are not the only languages spoken in that region, and there is certainly room for other interesting things to happen that Brithenig, Germanech, and Carrijina did not include.

*edit* whoops, I'm dumb and didn't notice that Sal basically said the exact same thing.

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brandrinn
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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by brandrinn »

Salmoneus wrote: Case survived in French for centuries - and then disappeared despite being adjacent to case-having languages.
Sal, you know I appreciate your genius, but do you have to work so hard to miss the point? Saying that there is a general trend does not mean there is an absolute law. Case has whittled away over the centuries in Romlangs generally, but not uniformly over space and time, just as global warming doesn't mean each year is exactly 0.1 degrees warmer than the last. Nobody is saying it is Verboten to make a Romlang with case. If you make it work, then good for you, though it will require a lot of finesse. It's the general disdain for "making it work" in a lot of conlangs that bothers me. You pointed out that case persisted in middle French. Great. This shows the boundaries of extant languages in Western Romance. If you make a conlang that has only slightly more robust case, that's not so weird. If it has eight cases, none of which are derived from Vulgar Latin, and the only explanation is "because Germany," well that's not good. Every Romlang deviates from the norm in some way, and there's no reason why yours shouldn't as well. But if it deviates in one way, it's likely to follow the pack in other ways, and vice versa, so that you get a interesting over-all package. Thus, paying attention to diachronics does not mean creating a clone of an existing language. It just means growing your language within that group of languages. There are times when making crazy things with no diachronic logic is a good idea. There are times when fitting your languages into an existing family is a good idea. It is very, very, unlikely that it will be a good idea to do both of those things at once.

I can't even believe that strawman stuff about the Italo-French border. You know perfectly well that was one example of what a Romlang could be, not the only thing it could be. Why do you do this stuff just to be contrarian? I'm serious, Sal, and I mean this in a respectful way. That kind of thing is not a debate. It's just... disagreeing for its own sake. Please, Sal. How long are you going to keep doing this?
[quote="Nortaneous"]Is South Africa better off now than it was a few decades ago?[/quote]

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Izambri »

Salmoneus wrote:Sure, if your romlang is sited in Andorra, you might want to borrow a lot from Spanish and French.
Occitan, Catalan and Aragonese, preferably.
If you take out Sardinia and southern Italy, you wouldn't have romlangs with initial mutations, or with retroflex plosives and fricatives (wait, doesn't Asturian have them too?)
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%B6
Un llapis mai dibuixa sense una mà.

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Re: Interesting things you've done/seen done in a Romlang...

Post by Ouagadougou »

Speaking of tone, it would be possible for a romlang descended from Classical Latin to develop a pitch accent, which could turn into tone. Ancient Greek had a pitch accent, and conquered Greece conquered Rome; educated Romans used Greek as much as Latin, many times borrowing words from the former into the latter. It wouldn't be too ridiculous for a romlang to evolve from Hellenized Classical Latin and then develop tone.
Alternatively, if althistory Rome were to conquer sub-Saharan Africa, Bantu-Romance could also develop tone.

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