Concept: Künschwel

[Das Public Viewing]

Perhaps this will be a full-blown scratchpad someday, but this is an ideä I've had rattling around my brain for quite some time.

Basically, one must assume 1 thing for this ideä (something I concede is growing less likely each week): Franco-German relations remain relatively good towards each other, specifically with the caveät that free movement between France and Germany, and therefore elevated French/German linguistic contact continues for an extended period of time. Two remarkably similar languages in terms of phonology and grammar, in contact for decades on end, will in my mind be the most likely environment for a possible language convergence.

Künschwel is the result of that contact: a relatively analytical language with large amounts of information encoded in the article. I don't know whether it'd be a Swahiliesque class prefix or still a separate morpheme at the time of convergence (which probably wouldn't be an actual point in time; Künschwel'd be a dialect continuum if anything).

I've had similar ideas before, but I think this one in particular'd have quite a few interesting features.

1) First off would be the most obvious: articles have all the information, while the nouns have almost nothing. This is something I noticed when I started learning German, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply to French. After all,
Der Hund ~~ Den Hund ~~ Dem Hund(e) ~~ Des Hunds
^{Def.Nom.M dog}|^{Def.Acc.M dog}|^{Def.Dat.M dog(-Dat)}|^{Def.Gen.M dog-Gen}
Seems pretty similar to
Le Chien ~~ Au Chien ~~ Du Chien
^{Def(.Obl?).M dog}|^{To.Def.M dog}|^{Of.Def.M dog}
Even if the latter's slightly semantically different and is missing the Nom/Acc distinction.
Everything in German but the masculine and pronouns has lost the distinction anyway. In fact, French and German both seem to do another weird thing with their articles: merging all the plural articles into a single unified plural article (die~den~der vs les~aux~des).
Plus, let's factor in simple German prepositions like an, zu, auf, von, etc. that yield forms like zur (zu der), vom (von dem), aufs (auf das). Combine this with the fact that even uncontracted French <le> is often /l/ ("sous le train"=/sultrã/, and the fact both French le and la become l' before a vowel ("avec l'air"=/avɛclɛʁ/), and it's easy to see the creätion a series of distinctions, systematically controlled entirely by the article and its easily-integrated friends.

2) Second, HEY WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE?
<Hund~Hunde~Hunden~Hunds>=/hʊnt/hʊndə/hʊndn̩/hʊnts/
(...two soundchages later...)
<Hund~Hunde~Hunden~Hunds>=/hʊnt/hʊnd/hʊn/hʊnts/
Now where have I seen that before?
<Vert(s)~Verte(s)>=/vɛʀ/vɛʀt/
Oh right!
Yep! I'm proposing that this language would have consonant gradation: on French adjectives and verbs (between original and zero) and German everything (original, devoiced, nasal). I know I've been using Hund so far, but IIRC, German -n,-m assimilates in most native speakers' speech to the previous consonant's POA. That's actually the reälization that kicked off this whole thing: that with the loss of the schwa and consonant-nasal assimilation, German could develop consonant gradation overnight.

Obviously, this is incomplete; I didn't actually go through the full, possibly Hungarian-esque, case system for the articles, nor did I outline the full conjugation/declension of various verbs/adjectives from the two languages, nor did I go into other points of similarity or any of the subtler differences between the two. Plus, I completely skipped indefinite articles for brevity.
However, the main point is this: am being I crazy here? Am I just imagining things, or could this be an ideä worth pursuing? How likely is the main ideä (close languages converging over time), and if it is likely, is this a decent guess of how it'd go? How realistic is CN̩>N/_#?