germano-latin
this is what some people call a """bogolang""" project, originating years and years ago when i looked at conlangs like wenedyk or brithenig, which derive what appear to be irl modern languages such as polish or welsh from different sources (in these cases latin), and wondered "why hasn't anyone done this to look like english?" the answer pretty quickly became obvious: because it gets confusing to turn half your vocabulary into romance when the other half is also already romance. rather than taking the sensible course of abandoning it, however, i ended up expanding the scope, and decided to essentially switch proto-germanic and latin, and see what it would look like if the romance languages were derived from proto-germanic and the germanic languages were derived from latin
pretty quickly it became clear that i would have to start with classical latin instead of vulgar latin. i know that this is a grave conlanging sin, but it's the only way to actually make this project work, because proto-germanic and classical latin both have contrastive vowel length and vulgar latin doesn't. so the new germanic (spoken in italy and the roman empire) gives way to a "vulgar germanic", which becomes the ancestor of the new germanicized french, spanish, etc.
as i mentioned in another post, i did end up changing my approach when it came to some of the sounds that don't match up between the languages. the biggest example is /θ/, which doesn't exist at all in latin but is very common in proto-germanic. originally i had it simply disappearing in the new "romance" languages (germano-french, etc.) and trying to find some way for it to develop in english and icelandic. but eventually i came to the conclusion that i want to start from the beginning and work forward, rather than start from the end result (e.g. a version of english phonology that works exactly like irl) and come up with rules that didn't happen irl in order to force the result that i was looking for. this means that when i'm trying to figure out how to develop a feature that exists in one group but not the other, i either work based on analogy with similar features (e.g. for figuring out what to do with /θ/ in the new "romance" languages, i might look at how other voiceless fricatives developed in irl romance) or look at how the feature developed in its own languages irl (so i would look at the different ways /θ/ developed in the germanic languages and figure out how parallel developments may have occurred in the alt-romance languages). in the case of /θ/ i chose the latter, since it's not a particularly common phoneme irl (or even in europe), and so only sardinian and romanian retain it into the modern day, while it becomes /d/ in all environments in most of the mainland languages (french, spanish, portuguese, northern italian dialects), and the central and southern italian dialects (as well as provençal) it becomes /t/ word-initially (except in grammatical words such as those reflected in english "that" and "there") and /d/ elsewhere; this parallels (maybe a little too closely tbh) the situation irl, where the relatively isolated island languages icelandic, english, and scots retain it, the mainland west germanic languages convert it to /d/, and the peninsular north germanic languages (as well as frisian) convert it to either /t/ or /d/ as described above
speaking of /θ/, the letters of the roman alphabet are the same as irl except they also now include the theta
the approach i described above, trying to be true to the actual historical developments rather than force it into being the "most english english" or "most french french" or whatever, is the approach i'm trying to take to the whole project as best i can. this means that some things aren't going to work the way i initially expected; for example, the "new" germanic languages will have adjectives following the nouns (as this was standard in latin and there's no historical justification for switching it out of the blue). i still need to work through some of my correspondences between different sets of pronouns, which i matched out before i really committed to this approach
a lot of the work i've been doing is trying to compile detailed sound change lists, which are frustratingly hard to track down. most sources only give the biggest or broadest-reaching changes, and often don't even break it down by stages of the language. my plan is to have a bunch of different files with SCA sound change rules (all working on the same sets of categories obviously) that i can cut and paste into the SCA to figure out how something would have developed. for example, given the following file names for the different stages of development:
- 205: Proto-Germanic to Old English
- 210: Old English to Middle English
- 220: Middle English to Early Modern English
- 230: Early Modern English to Modern English
- 350: Proto-Germanic to Old Frankish
- 510: Classical Latin to Western Vulgar Latin
- 700: Western Vulgar Latin to Old Gallo-Romance
- 710: Old Gallo-Romance to Old Norman
- 720: Old Norman to Anglo-Norman
to this end, i've also been sketching out lists of word etymologies for all basic terms i can think of, plus more that might be helpful (e.g. "computer"). mostly i've been getting the etymologies from wiktionary, but etymonline has also been helpful for english words, and duden's herkunftswörterbuch has been somewhat helpful for german (though it frequently either only traces a word's etymology back to OHG, or else traces it to OHG but then maddeningly skips PG to give the PIE root!). for ambiguous or uncertain cases i'm basically making judgement calls. some examples:
ant
- English/German: from PG "ēmaitijǭ" (ant)
- Dutch/North Germanic: from PG "miurijǭ" (ant)
- Yiddish: from PSlav "morvъ" (ant)
- Romance: from L "formīca" (ant)
- --- gmclat words
- Yiddish: from PSlav "morvъ"
- other Germanic: from L "formīca"
- French/Italian: from PG "ēmaitijǭ"
- other Romance: from PG "miurijǭ"
- Faroese: from PG "sūraz" (sour) + "aplaz" (apple)
- other Germanic: from PG "aplaz" (apple)
- Portuguese/Spanish: from VL "mattiana" (of Mattium), or from VL "Matianum" (Matius, a friend of Caesar)
- French: from L "pōma" (pl of fruit)
- Italian/Romanian: from L "mālum" (apple) < Gk "mâlon" (fruit)
- --- gmclat words:
- Faroese: from L "acidus" + "mālum" ["mālum" + "acidus"?]
- other Germanic: from L "mālum"
- Portuguese/Spanish: from VL [adj form of PG form of "Mattium"]
- French: from PG "ubatjō" ("ubatją")
- Italian/Romanian: from PG "aplaz"
with the etymologies i've mostly just been collapsing everything that comes from the same root word(s) into one entry. but clearly the next step (and arguably what i should have been doing from the beginning) is instead listing the path each word took, by means of the SCA file numbers i developed, so i can run them through the rules and see what the forms will be. the only entry i've even come close to doing this with is the one for potato, and even that's only because it's so fucking complicated lmao:
| Language | Root/Source | Borrowing Chain/Other Notes |
| Eng/Sco/Nor/Swe/Sp (Eur)/It/Port | from Taíno "batata" (sweet potato) | Taíno to Sp (Eur), Port; Sp to Eng, It; Eng to Scots, Swe [Eng pl], Nor |
| Dutch/Fris | from [EARTH] + [APPLE] | same compound also appears as synonym in various other Germanic languages |
| Ger/Yid/Dan/Ice/Rom | from It dim. of "tartufo" (truffle) < L "terrae tūber" (tuber of the earth) | Ger to Dan/Rom/Yid; Dan to Ice |
| Faroese | from Gmc "apalją" (apple) | this is probably why faroese calls an apple "sour apple" (see above) |
| Sp (LatAm) | from Quechua "papa" (potato) | n/a |
| French | from [APPLE] + [OF] + [EARTH] | n/a |
| Language | Root/Source |
| Eng/Sco/Nor/Swe/Sp (Eur)/It/Port | from Taíno "batata" |
| Dutch/Fri | from [EARTH] + [APPLE] |
| Ger/Yid/Dan/Ice/Rom | from It dim. of < Gmc [tuber of the earth] |
| Faroese | from L "mālum" |
| Sp (LatAm) | from Quechua "papa" |
| French | from [APPLE] + [OF] + [EARTH] |
other work i've been doing is looking at declension (primarily nouns and pronouns) and, recently, dipping my toes into verb conjugations. i can't make any real headway until i can get the sound changes down, since the way these inflections and conjugations develop is heavily influenced by the sound changes the various languages go through, but i can at least start to get some idea of what things might look like. the nouns and pronouns are fairly simple, since the systems between the two languages are pretty similar (heavy inflection, five or six cases, vocatives that don't last very long in the development, etc.). but the verbs are more daunting, since latin has way more tenses than germanic, but also germanic has the stark distinction between the so-called strong and weak verbs, so trying to figure out how that all develops in parallel is going to be a lot of work
sorry if this doesn't make a lot of sense, it's late and i'm tired. also i hope someone finds this interesting lol. feel free to ask me any questions, i never get to talk about this with anyone because i'm horrifically embarrassed about conlanging lmfao
