Alternate Vulgar Latin?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Can you image how Vulgar Latin might have evolved differently than it did? Either keeping more Classical features or different ones? Like, having simpler verb system but maintaining Icelandic-like declension? Or to be more phonologically innovative yet still keeping most morphological categories intact?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Essentially a parallel descendant of Classical Latin? It's certainly imagineable.

[Otto Kretschmer]

There is this http://www.kunstsprachen.de/s17/s_01.html

It is derived from Latin of 1st century AD and generally fits the description of phonologically innovative, morphologically conservative language

Is it possible for Vulgar Latin as a whole (and subsequent Romance languages) to stay more conservative overall?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Are Canary Islands a good place for a conservartive Romlang?

Let's say remnants of Carthage flee there and Rome finishes them off. Or a colony is established for the sake of trade or some Roman patrician just likes the islands.

Would insular isolation keep the language consertative a'la Icelandic?

[WeepingElf]

Why not?

[keenir]

Are Canary Islands a good place for a conservartive Romlang?

Would insular isolation keep the language consertative a'la Icelandic?

It could, certainly; it could equally kick linguistic change into high gear.

[Kuchigakatai]

Would insular isolation keep the language consertative a'la Icelandic?

Once you put a language in a far island, I think the chances of it becoming weirdly conservative in some areas and weirdly innovative in others are high.

Look at Sardinian, not even far from Sicily. It weirdly still conserves an old unusual evolution of the vowel system, and cī/ci cē/ce > [ki kɛ]. And it at least weirdly innovated a very trimmed down verb conjugation, with no Italo-Western future or conditional, only one subjunctive and no pluperfect, and some dialects at least have recently even formed a preterite with a consistent ending with -s-, regardless of conjugation type (-esi -esti -esit -esimus -ezis -esint, used even with -are verbs).

[Ketsuban]

Look at Sardinian, not even far from Sicily. It weirdly still conserves an old unusual evolution of the vowel system, and cī/ci cē/ce > [ki kɛ].

Unusual synchronically, sure, but diachronically one must include African Romance, whose evidence for sharing these developments with Sardinian is uncontroversial.

[Ares Land]

Can you image how Vulgar Latin might have evolved differently than it did? Either keeping more Classical features or different ones? Like, having simpler verb system but maintaining Icelandic-like declension? Or to be more phonologically innovative yet still keeping most morphological categories intact?

The trick to that game is to figure out why exactly Vulgar Latin proceeded as it did. Basically, there weren't a lot of ways grammatical evolution could go due to a couple of sound changes: nasalization/final /m/ dropping and short vowel merger.
Then, of course, what you have to do is finagle with those changes to get something you like.

Branching off, as you suggest, after the Punic Wars is a great idea. You could for instance, have all short vowels merge with their long counterparts, as in Southern Romance. You could keep four distinct cases in second declension, and three in first and third. Icelandic-like enough

The Canary Island seem too out of the way for me, plus they're really arid and barren. But, hey, whatever works for you! In any case, linguistically, it works! You'd escape most of the linguistic trends within Vulgar Latin.

I wouldn't think of that in terms of 'conservative', really. Italian is very conservative phonologically yet lost case; Old French was more conservative morphologically while being phonologically more innovative.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Was the number of l2 speakers a factor in disappearance of cases in Latin?

What if Latin in pre classical period never developed the strong onitial accdnt that it had for quite some time?

[Ares Land]

1) I don't think so. It's hard to say, really, but it doesn't look like it did. FWIW case was retained in both Old French and Romanian -- where we may suppose Latin had lots of L2 speakers. We know people in Rome had long been dropping their m's, and we have no hint that VL short vowels sounded particularly provincial. (In Africa and Sardinian people dropped length but kept the original quantity, and *that* sounded off to Roman ears.)

2) Really hard to say. It would have kept some sort of pitch accent? A bunch of words would be different? ( We.d have accapio instead of accipio so perhaps we'd 'accapt' things?)
I don't think we have any good data on when Old Latin acquired initial stress (it could've been there in proto Italic for all we know) or what it had before (pitch accent, most likely?)

[Kuchigakatai]

6th century Visigothic slates, which are generally written in some pretty non-standard Latin, also show a good consistent distinction between nominative on one hand and accusative-ablative on the other, so it looks like the case distinction that shows up later in Old French/Occitan was still present there at that time.

In a parallel universe, Portuguese and Spanish still have case distinctions, marking them in a similar way as Old French/Occitan did. They didn't really lose cases because of phonology...

[Moose-tache]

In a parallel universe, Portuguese and Spanish still have case distinctions, marking them in a similar way as Old French/Occitan did. They didn't really lose cases because of phonology...

This is important to keep in mind. Welsh lost case endings due to the loss of final syllables. But the sound changes reducing those final syllables weren't that much more drastic than the ones that operated in Gaelic. If Irish can cling to the last vestiges of noun case, Welsh could have done so as well. Brittonic speakers chose not to do so, analogically extending nominative forms to cover all uses of the noun. Bulgar Latin had the option to reduce or not reduce noun cases, stem endings that show number and gender, various tenses and personal suffixes on verbs, etc. Analogy is just as important in alternate history as sound change.

[Ares Land]

Sure. There were certainly other factors, though I'm not sure we know much about these!
(I worked on, basically, an alternate Italian, judging that different linguistic influence and different history might lead to a nom/acc/gen distinction being preserved.)

But phonology did play a role! Most distinctions ended up disappearing, or being particularly confusing.

[WeepingElf]

In a parallel universe, Portuguese and Spanish still have case distinctions, marking them in a similar way as Old French/Occitan did. They didn't really lose cases because of phonology...

This is important to keep in mind. Welsh lost case endings due to the loss of final syllables. But the sound changes reducing those final syllables weren't that much more drastic than the ones that operated in Gaelic. If Irish can cling to the last vestiges of noun case, Welsh could have done so as well. Brittonic speakers chose not to do so, analogically extending nominative forms to cover all uses of the noun. Bulgar Latin had the option to reduce or not reduce noun cases, stem endings that show number and gender, various tenses and personal suffixes on verbs, etc. Analogy is just as important in alternate history as sound change.

I think the difference between Brythonic and Goidelic which led to the retention of case in the latter was that in Goidelic, the "broad vs. slender" (unpalatalized vs. palatalized) contrast developed, which preserved traces of the lost syllables better than in Brythonic, which has no such thing. If you look at Goidelic case paradigms, you will see that the distinction between "broad" and "slender" consonants plays a major role in the case distinctions.

[Otto Kretschmer]

BTW what led to extreme phonetic changes in Irish? When you look at Primitive Irish, it looks like a variety of Proto Celtic. Just a few centuries later you see a language that is as far removed as Old English is fyom Proto Germanic, if not more

[alice]

BTW what led to extreme phonetic changes in Irish? When you look at Primitive Irish, it looks like a variety of Proto Celtic. Just a few centuries later you see a language that is as far removed as Old English is fyom Proto Germanic, if not more

Possibly heavy initial stress, as also with Germanic?

[WeepingElf]

BTW what led to extreme phonetic changes in Irish? When you look at Primitive Irish, it looks like a variety of Proto Celtic. Just a few centuries later you see a language that is as far removed as Old English is fyom Proto Germanic, if not more

One idea that came to me but am not sure of is that before Christianization, there was a diglossia in Ireland (and also in Britain), with a conservative ritual language little changed from Proto-Celtic used by the druids, and a more innovative colloquial language, and that the Ogham inscriptions were in the druidic language which fell into oblivion after Christianization. This would give the vernacular language more time to restructure. Something similar to this happened, after all, in India, where the Vedas were orally transmitted in a language hardly changed from Proto-Indo-Aryan while the vernacular languages had already moved on to the Middle Indo-Aryan stage; in fact, the Indian model was what brought me to the idea laid out above.

Of course, many people blame a substratum for the restructuring of the Insular Celtic languages, which is often held to be Semitic or related to it - but the Insular Celtic languages do not really have that much in common with Semitic. Alas, nobody knows what was spoken in the British Isles before Celtic was established there (it is not even certain just when the Isles became Celtic-speaking, but that can't have been very long before the onset of written transmission in Western Europe, so the notion of the Bell Beaker people speaking Proto-Celtic is IMHO probably erroneous).

[dewrad]

Regarding heavy initial stress, I have long nurtured a theory that it is actually original to Latin and Celtic, and spread to Proto-Germanic during a period of heavy contact between Proto-Germanic and Gaulish. And, in turn, penultimate stress spread from later Latin to Gaulish and Brythonic, but never made it to Goidelic. The question is how Latin developed non-initial stress.

[alice]

The question is how Latin developed non-initial stress.

You don't need any explanation much more complicated than a secondary stress developing on heavy penults, which later became a primary stress, surely?