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Does anyone know where I could find information on Proto-Romanian? Specifically, a lexicon of reconstructed words and a grammar would be ideal, but I'd also take sound changes from Latin in a pinch. I'm trying to do an a posteriori Eastern Romance conlang and finding it surprisingly difficult to get info.

Thanks for any responses.

You're lucky: Romanian is one of the fairly few languages whose sound changes are documented in detail on Wikipedia.

Cedh wrote:You're lucky: Romanian is one of the fairly few languages whose sound changes are documented in detail on Wikipedia.

Putting them in order is tricky. I abandoned the effort back in 2004. One of my problems was that I couldn't work out how to load and save files from a web page. I also got distracted by the spectre of optional sound changes, which really clobbered the javascript for the sound changer. I didn't publish the javascript for that.

Kilanie wrote:Does anyone know where I could find information on Proto-Romanian? Specifically, a lexicon of reconstructed words and a grammar would be ideal, but I'd also take sound changes from Latin in a pinch. I'm trying to do an a posteriori Eastern Romance conlang and finding it surprisingly difficult to get info.

Thanks for any responses.

Do you speak Romanian? If so, there's a few odds and sods in Romanian on Proto-Romanian (common Romanian, that is, not "Proto-Eastern Romance"), but they're not wonderful. For soundchanges from Latin (plus grammatical changes, which IMO are probably more important here), see Alkire and Rosen's Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (pdfs of which should be available from places like libgen, not that I would ever condone such a thing...)- this is the source from which the soundchanges on Wikipedia are drawn.

My own conlang (see link in sig) is Eastern Romance, so I'm pretty knowledgeable on the topic, including the history of the other "Eastern Romance" languages (Italian, Neapolitan, Dalmatian etc). If you've got any questions, I'm generally pretty happy to answer them.

Dewrad wrote:Stuff

Unfortunately I don't speak Romanian, that would probably make this whole thing a lot easier.

I didn't realize there was a difference between "Proto-Romanian" and "Proto-Eastern-Romance". I'd be interested in information on either.

I'll definitely take a look at your conlang; it's good to know someone else has traversed this territory and done it successfully.

Kilanie wrote: Unfortunately I don't speak Romanian, that would probably make this whole thing a lot easier.

Technical Romanian is full of recent Latin/Italian loan words, which makes it relatively easy to read of you know Latin. (I suspect Italian would suffice, but I've no confirmation.)

Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of romantic stuff out there deriving Romanian from Dacian instead of Latin.

The wonderful thing is, Romanian has whole sound changes and grammatical paradigms borrowed from the local Slavic languages.

Stuff like à -> ə, ò -> u, šč > št, CoRC -> CRoC, the feminine vocative in -o, etc

I think the most likely situation - given also the huge amount of Slavic borrowings in the vocabulary - is widespread diglossia in the medieval Vlach community.

Most likely, the romance-speaking cattle herders of the Balkans followed seasonal migration routes into the Carpathians, while retaining command of Slavic for ecclesiastical & economic purposes. Once the Ottoman conquests and constant warfare depopulated lower Transylvania and the Wallachian plain, they moved down and colonized the regions fully.

But this is slightly controversial?

R.Rusanov wrote:Most likely, the romance-speaking cattle herders of the Balkans followed seasonal migration routes into the Carpathians, while retaining command of Slavic for ecclesiastical & economic purposes. Once the Ottoman conquests and constant warfare depopulated lower Transylvania and the Wallachian plain, they moved down and colonized the regions fully.

But this is slightly controversial?

:/ No, it isn't? Aside from some rabid Romanian nationalists, I think that's pretty much the consensus on what happened.

That just means it's not slightly controversial, it's microscopically controversial