Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

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dva_arla
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Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Or, Rom-auxlanging the Interslavic way

(Introduction to come) I have been informed that the name InterRoman has been taken; it will take some while to come up and decide on another name for the language. The language would have to, for the time being, be referred to as 'the language', 'our language', and other hopelessly indescript names.

Orthography and Phonology

Consonants

b c~qu d f g h l m n p r s t v (z)

qu is, as in Latin, an allograph of c before u.

h is always silent.

s may (or not) be pronounced /z/ between two vowels. r may be pronounced as a trill, flap, gutural, or however the speaker sees fit.

Before front vowels both the classical/velar (/k g/) and Vulgar (affricativised) readings of c and g are acceptable. Of the latter the readings /tʃ dʒ/ ,/ts dz/ are preferred over the reading /s z/, unless the consonant system is pronounced in such a way that would not lead into the confusion, say, of ci ce with si se, e.g. if s is pronounced in an apical manner.

((For the sake of minimising confusion it is, however, still advisable to mark velars before front vowels of foreign provenance differently, i.e. Kirov, Chirov, Quirov, C'irov, etc. for Киров; Dombrovski, Dombrovschi, Dombrovsqui, etc. for Dąbrowski; Oquinawa, Ochinawa, Occinawa, etc. for 沖縄. Transliterations of Chinese words are an exception; the ambiguity of the pronunciation of c g allows the transliteration to be read in the manner of Mandarin (i.e. as affricates) or the Southern Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Hakka, etc., i.e. as velars), thus e.g. Pecin for 北京.))

Iotated consonants

lh~ly~yl nh~ny~yn ry~yr

These diphthongs represents combinations of consonants and glides found before final -um. Since the ending is dropped in the language, what remains is the iotated vowel: cony, conh /koɲ/ 'wedge' ; fornary, fornayr /fornaːr(j)~fornɛːr(j)/ 'baker'. NB: palatalisation of ry, yr is optional; perhaps only the Balkan tongues possess palatalised trills/flaps.

Vowels

a, ā - a
e - ie
ē - ei
i - e
ī .. i
o - uo
ō - ou
u - o
ū - u

ae - ae / ie
oe - oe / ie
au - ao / au


The rather incongruous spelling of the phonemes corresponding to Latin front and back vowels are justified by their corresponding reflexes in Romance languages; short e o, which are reflected as open-mid vowels in Western Romance by the time of the Frankish Empire at the latest, develop into diphthongs in the two most spoken Romance languages in the world: /ie, uo > u/ in French, /ie, uo > ue/ in Castillian; ei were then monophthongised into /i/ in Friulian and Dalmatian. Under these circumstances uo and ie would be fairly good orthographical compromises. ē develops into ei > oi in French and o into /oa~ua/ in Romanian when a syllable in /a/ follows.

ao and au are both tolerated, but ao has the advantage of being distinguishable from Latin 'learned' re-borrowings with slightly different nuances. Cf. caosa /kɔsa ~ kʌsa/ 'thing' vs. causa /kaʊsa/ 'cause' (esp. in set phrases such as causa prima).

The speaker, however, is at liberty to pronounce each of these digraphs as their tongues deem comfortable and natural. Some mergers are tolerable: ei to merge with either ie or i, ao with o, &c.

Latin declensional endings -am and -em (in the acc. sing.) are reflected as -a and -e, while -um is entirely dropped, instead of being reflected as -o or -u as in several Romauxlang (though both aforementioned endings may be inserted in poetry when needed to suit the metre). Since the latter ending is the most common one in Latin, dropping it would be, from a economic perspective, expedient. This also pulls the language away from a 'Hispano-Italian bias' in look and sound, and is a neat compromise between the 'North-western' and Balkan tongues on one hand, and the Iberian and Italian ones on the other (cf. Catalan and Occitan, which, to some, may give the impression of sounding somewhere between Castilian and the Langues d'oïl).

Alternative 'simpler' orthography

For a more transparent concordance between sound and phoneme the following can be done:

1. Omitting all instances of h.
2. Replacing intervocalic b with v habere > avere; Fortunati sont spanioli, per que bivere est vivere.
3. ae, oe, ie merged into ie (but ao always kept separate; see Vowels)

Optional etymological orthography

An accent grav or circumflex may, for etymological purposes, be superposed on top of an an a, giving à or â. Their usage, however, are optional; since they are not meant for wider, more common usage writers are advised to use them sparingly.

Principles of word design: roots

1. Where, in expressing a concept, all or most modern Romance languages share a common etymon which differs from the one in Latin, the word in the Language takes

This gives us pairs of Latinate/vulgar lexemes (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_c ... to-Romance), allowing for a variation of lexical register in writing and perhaps in speech if so desired, in imitation of languages that do possess such distinctions: Javanese, Japanese, etc.

e.g. Mary is eating the bread she had cooked in fire.
Maria panes quos igne coxerat edit. (Latin as translated from English by Google Translate; I barely write any Latin and can't assess the veracity of this translated)
Maria pane que in igne habe coct edi. (high register with features, especially syntax, from the Classical tongue, for an 'archaising' style)
Maria edi il pane que habe coct in igne. (high register)
Maria manduca il pane que ha coct in fuoc. (colloquial, standard register)

2. Where Romance languages are evenly spread (by geography; exact criteria, something like the six Slavic dialectal 'subgroups' used in Interslavic lexicography, to be determined later) between two or three Latin etyma, both may be taken as equivalent synonyms; the variation between the latter taken as analogous to dialectal isoglosses, cf. Interslavic flavourisation. For English 'beautiful' one would have the words bell and formous; with the literary/dialectal synonym pulcr accompanying both.

3. Where Romance languages diverge far enough from each other the Latin word may be taken as a compromise, or a form from one of the modern tongues which diverges least in meaning from the Latin word. Consider the following words corresponding to English 'dirty' (gratuitously extracted from Wiktionary, sorted by groups partly geographical and partly genetic):

Oïl:
French: sale (fr)
Norman: sale
Walloon: mannet (wa), måssî (wa), niche (wa), swasse (wa)

Oc:
Catalan: brut (ca), llord (ca)
Occitan: brut (oc), lord (oc)

Iberian:
Asturian: puercu (ast), suciu, gochu (ast)
Galician: sucio
Portuguese: sujo (pt)
Spanish: sucio (es)

Gallo-Italian (incl. Romansh)
Friulian: sporc
Romansch: malnet, tschuf
Venetian: spórco, paẑ (vec)

Italian:
Italian (Tuscan): sporco (it), sudicio (it), lurido (it), lercio (it)
Neapolitan: nzivato

Insular Italian:
Sardinian (Campidanese) feu
Sicilian: lordu (scn), sporcu, nzivatu, loddu

Balkan Romance:
Romanian: murdar (ro), nespălat (ro), jegos (ro)

These deviation between these form is so great that choosing one or two forms would come at the expense of many languages. Our word may have to be derived from the Latin form sordidus: giving us the word sordid; though not found in the 'colloquial' strata of the vocabulary of any of the modern tongues (only existing within in semi-borrowed, learned terms). Alternatively one may take as our word sporc, derived from an etymon, reflected in Italian, Friulian, and Sicilian, which has experienced the least semantic drift from the Latin word.
Last edited by dva_arla on 25 Nov 2021 06:06, edited 3 times in total.
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Further notes on orthography

Changes taking place in Vulgar Latin that are reflected in all or most modern tongues may be incorporated into Our Language.

Syncope:
oculus 'eye' > ocl

Elision and simplification:
frīgidus 'cold' > freid or freigd (the latter form a semi-etymological rendering); vocalism based on Romance descendants
cīvitās 'city' > citate
trīginta '30' > treinta
quadrāgintā '40' > quaranta
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Joined: 25 Oct 2019 21:03
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Stress, by default, falls onto the final syllable in words ending in a consonant and the penultimate in words ending in a vowel or the plural -s.

'Unstress mark'

Some word-final suffixes tend to 'repel' stress (e.g. the present third-person plural suffix -ent, -ant, -unt, etc.), while hardly any antepenultimate syllables attract stress away from the default (while the first and second person plural suffixes -Vm and -Vte do attract stress, they are placed in the final syllable of words or the antepenultimate syllable with an open syllable trailing after. Their stress are thus in concordance with the default, and therefore need no marking). Such syllables which are unstressed in violation of the default stress are marked with a brev or caron/anticircumflex; the stress is deferred to the nearest preceding syllable E.g. (stress in bold) amănt (vs. amante).

Epenthesis

The 'unstress' caron allows us to introduce another element to the language: epenthesis. An unstressed vowel may be introduced to break up clusters, mainly word-final ones, which may present challenges in pronunciation.
The default epenthetic is ŭ following c or g and ĕ following other consonants, hence ocŭl, pulcŭr, nuostĕr, matĕr.
The epenthetic may be elided when the cluster that would be produced by its omission ceases to be word-final, hence amic nuostĕr, but amica nuostra
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Declension

Gender

Nouns and adjectives agree to three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The neuter is needed to account for nouns which have become masculine in some languages but feminine in others: mare 'sea', lacte 'milk', etc. Its membership has been greatly reduced from the Latin neuter; found exclusively in words ending with -e.

A great majority of words ending in consonants are of the masculine gender, those ending in -a feminine, while those ending in -e can be of either three gender -- the latter shall be marked whenever neccessary.

Adjectives ending in consonants and articles agree to the gender of the noun heading them, while adjectives ending in -e do not:

il grande buon catt 'the great big cat'
la grande buona vacca 'the great big cow'
lo/le lacte dulce (n) 'the sweet milk'

A bit on syntax: adjectives may be placed either before or after the noun they describe. Word order is fairly lax in the language.

Number

The language provides the choices, equally valid for the time being, of a uniform plural ending in -s, or one which involves a slight alteration of the dessinence.

amica - amicae/amicas
caball - caballi/caballs
piede (m) - piedi/piedes

'High' register note: the plurals of (mostly) masculine words corresponding to Latin neuters in -um may be marked with the suffix -a. E.g. sepulcŭr - sepulcra, alongside more 'colloquial' sepulcŭrs or sepulcri.
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Posts: 184
Joined: 25 Oct 2019 21:03
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

A note on the conjugation: the classes, infinitive, present

Verbs are conjugated to four conjugations, corresponding largely to the Latin ones:

1 mancar(e) 'eat': manc, mancas, manca, mancam, mancati, mancănt
2 habeir(e) 'have': hab / hayb, habes, habe, habeim, habeiti, habĕnt
3 coquĕr(e) 'cook': coqu*, coques, coque, coquĕm, coquĕti, coquŏnt
capĕr(e) 'take, catch': cap / cayp, capes, cape, capěm, capěti, capiŏnt
4 sentir(e) 'feel': senti, sentis/sentes, senti/sente, sentim, sentiti, sentiŏnt

The copula
esser(e) 'be': sou, es, e**, som, esti, sont

*pronounced as if coc
**or est in the literary register

The ending -re, being characteristic enough of the infinitive, may be shortened to -r and be still recognisable as an infinitival ending.

Conjugation is an area where distinctions of register can be made; the verb can be declined the 'classicalising' (but still somewhat regularised) way:
pot'ser(e): pot'sou, pot'ĕs, pot'ĕst, pot'som, pot'esti, pot'sŏnt (note the semblance to the present forms of esser)

or in a form more resembling ones found in the modern tongues:
poteir(e): pot, potes, pote, poteim, poteiti, potĕnt
Last edited by dva_arla on 28 Nov 2021 05:11, edited 3 times in total.
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Posts: 184
Joined: 25 Oct 2019 21:03
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

The present and past (or perfect) participles

1 mancar - mancant, mancat
2 habeir - habent, habet~habut
3 coquĕr - coquent, coqut*
capĕr - capient, capt
4 sentir - sentient, sentit (Lit. sens, sentt)
audir - audient, audit


*pronounced as if coct (cf. Latin coctus), but spelled as such (or, alternatively, coqt) in order to preserve integrity of conjugation.
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Posts: 184
Joined: 25 Oct 2019 21:03
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Overview of the verb: Classical and Vulgar Latin, Romance languages, and our auxlang:

Simple forms projected into the language. Forms that are projected into the language (i.e not discarded) in bold.

Non-finite forms
Infinitive: manducar
Gerundive: manducand (only used in elevated/archaising variants)
Present participle: manducant*, manducante
Past participle: manducat

Indicatives

Imperfect, or 'Infect' forms
Present: manduc -ø -as -a -am -ati -ănt
(Past) imperfect: manducáb -a(m)/-ø* -as -a -ăm -ăti -ănt***
Future: not surviving in Romance languages (the Future is formed by a combination of the inf. + pres. forms of habēre in most Western Romance, and with pres. forms of volēre + inf. in literary Romanian, or habēre + the subjunctive (both inflected) in the colloquial), therefore probably not included in our language.

Perfect forms
(Past) Perfect / preterite: manducá(v)` -i -ist -i/u**** -im -isti -irŏnt
Future perfect: survives only in the Iberian languages (and in those languages fallen into disuse), and therefore not reflected in our language.
Pluperfect: survives only in Iberian languages and Sicilian.


Subjunctives

Imperfect, or 'Infect' forms
Present: manduc -e(m) -es -e -eim -eiti -ĕnt (c.f the second conjugation)
Perfect: defunct

Perfect forms
Imperfect: surviving only in Iberian languages, there as a personal infinitive (due to the similarity of the infix in -re- with the infinitive suffix)
Pluperfect: manducá(vi/i)ss` -e(m) -es -e -eim -eiti -ĕnt

*form based on Latin gerundive in -ndum, but whose meaning had shifted to a present participle in most language. May be used alongside with manducante, the form actually derived from the Latin present participle.
**-a based on Lat. -am and Romance, -ø in order to maintain consistency with the present.
*** un-stress caron required because stress always falls onto the preceding infix áb. Alternatively the latter may be marked with an accent acut, and the suffixes left unmarked: both manducábam and manducabăm are acceptable
****-i the more regular of the forms, -u based on reflexes in Romance
` the -v-, -vi-, -i- may be retained in more elevated registers


Compound tenses (to be updated later):

Compound perfect: habeir + prf. prt. (in -t)
habe manducat

Future: habeir + inf. or inf. + habeir
habe manducar or manducar habe

Passive forms: inflected form of esser + prf. prt. (in -t)

Though not surviving in any Romance languages, these two periphrastic forms are transparent in formation, and may serve some use in expressing nuances that are hard to express otherwise, and therefore are included in our language.

Active periphrastic: inflected form of esser + future participle (in -ur) [in either oorder]
manducatur(a) est

Passive (neccesitative?) periphrastic: inflected form of esser + gerund (in -nd) [in either order]
manducand(a) est, Carthagon est delenda (Carthago is to be destroyed)
Last edited by dva_arla on 27 Nov 2021 05:25, edited 1 time in total.
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
dva_arla
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Posts: 184
Joined: 25 Oct 2019 21:03
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Re: Yet another Rom-auxlang (the Interslavic way)

Post by dva_arla »

Infinitive and subjunctive indicative present endings by conjugation

1 manducar
manduc - as a am ati ănt
manduc e(m) es e eim eiti ĕnt

2 deibeir
deib - es e eim eiti ĕnt
deib(e) a(m) as a am ati ănt

3 dicer
dic - es e ĕm ĕti ŏnt
dic a(m) as a am ati ănt

facio
fac -(i?) es e ĕm ĕti iŏnt
faci a(m) as a am ati ănt
bold: influences from the 4th conj.

4 aodir
aod -/i is i im it iŏnt
aodi a(m) as a am ati ănt
Conlangs in progress:
Modern Khotanese
Modern Gandhari
?? - Japonic language in the Mekong Delta
Locna - Indo-European language in N. Syria
Wexford Norse
A British romlang, &c.
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