Garth Wallace wrote:

Daniel Bowman wrote: » For example, Samadurian actually comes » from mangling “cellar door”, > Is that a hidden reference to Tolkien? ;-)

Yes indeed! That’s the only relation, though; the milieu it’s intended for is very un-Tolkeinesque.

To which I replied:

mercurii dies ‘Wednesday’ used to be melcordí in Rhodrese, which of course was an oblique reference to Tolkien (and one which Tolkien would perhaps not have liked very much!). In the current version of the lang the form is meocordí, and thus not that obvious anymore, if you aren’t aware of the change of non-prevocalic /l/ to /w/.

Ah, creative help! The mention of **melcordí gave me a flash of inspiration today how to explain that Rhodanu becomes Rhuodre rather than **Rhuorn or **Rhuorre and Rhodanense > rhodray rather than **rhornay or **rhorray, and so be able to keep the current name of the Rhodrese language without introducing an exception or inconsistencies or implausibilities in the historical phonology.

Since the language anyway has dissimilation of laterals within a word r…r > l…r and l…l > r…l it makes sense if intervocalic /d/ fails to become /ɾ/ in the structure *rVdV,¹ so even if vadimus becomes */βaɾemu/ then Rhodanus becomes */rɔːdanu/ due to the initial /r/, with */dn/ later becoming /dr/ and then again the initial /r/ stops */rɔːdrə/ from becoming **/rɔːrə/ when */paːdrə/ becomes */paːrə/.

True /dr/ will still be very infrequent, but I want to keep *pare ‘pair’ distinct from ‘father’ by having ‘father’ keep or get a final *-/ə/ > -/ɪ/ in both the singular and the plural. This will also help to keep ‘rocks’ distinct from ‘feet’:

• petra > pierre,
• petras > pirre,
• pede >pier,
• pedes > pir.

While this would make ‘fathers’ and ‘rock’ identical that ambiguity will be resolved by the articles:

• un/el piarre ‘a/the father’
• eun/li pierre ‘(some)/the fathers’
• (u)ne/la pierre ‘a/the rock’
• eun/li pirre ‘(some)/the rocks’

(Synchronically eun doesn’t mean ‘some’ anymore, but is just really an indefinite plural article. The real expression for ‘some rocks’ is aocheun pirre. Nouns without any article are usually uncountable mass nouns (e.g. addeç sial ‘add salt’). Of course the definite article is used in general statements concerning all members of a class, where Germanic languages would use an indefinite plural: li pirre son deur ‘(the) rocks are hard’.)

Related posts

• The Rhodrese indefinite article (0)
• MGR-Northern Romance (2)
• Northern Romance chronology and phonology (0)

With the sound changes now more or less in place, I’ve also been working on some grammar basics (pronouns, articles, etc) but I’m too tired to write up all of that right now!

Pete

Well, since I’m playing around with a Romanised ‘High German,’ and you are interested in a Roman Low German / English analogue, it seems obvious we need a common Proto-dialect, which I think of as “Northern Romance.” It’s clear these northern dialects are going to evolve from Western/Gallo-Romance, with a POD sometime in the first 2 or 3 centuries CE.

I’ve been working on phonologies and a ‘GMP’, as you know. To take us up to the point where our high and low dialects diverge sometime in the middle of the first millennium, I have two stages. The first stage applies the sound changes attested in VL to the CL lexicon. Not ideal, as the one language does not evolve from the other of course, but you need to make the best of what you have. Naturally, where there are known CL/VL differences I’ve gone with the VL and slotted it in as best I can.

The second stage considers the phoneme inventories of VL and Germanic and melds the one to the other. Hopefully, the result is the sort of Latin pronunciation that might come about from the substantial Germanic substrate that would have existed. Once that has been achieved it then continues onward, applying the OTL West Germanic sound changes (I then continue further with AHD, MHD and NHD changes, but these of course are irrelevant in the Low German areas).

Stage 1 (CL > VL, BCE up to circa 200 CE)

/j/ > /jj/ V _ V

/a, a:/ > /A/

/e, ai/ > /E/

/i, oi, e:/ > /e/

/o/ > /O/

/u, o:/ > /o/

/u:/ > /U/

/i:/ > /I/

/au/ > /o/ _ C

/I, E, e/ > /j/ _ V

/I, E, e/ > /j/ V _

V > 0 C _ /l, r/

/E/ > /e/ _ $ /i/ #

/O/ > /o/ _ $ /i/ #

/e/ > /I/ _ $ /i/ #

/o/ > /U/ _ $ /i/ #

/h/ > 0

/m/ > 0 _ # Except monosyllables

/w/ > /B/ (i.e. semivocalic /) /kw, gw/ not affected