The Missals Scratchpad

[missals]

Here's something I came up with suddenly this afternoon - yes, a Romlang nominal inflection table, how wonderful. Inspired by Romanian's suffixed article, of course. A word in each of the three genders is provided.









The given IPA transcriptions represent each word pronounced in isolation (save for footnotes 2/3, see below). They are technically phonetic transcriptions, since phonemically nasalized vowels can be safely analyzed as the result of deletion of coda /n/ (which is consistent). Both coda /n/ and vocalized /l/ resurface in intervocalic position, e.g. lobul albul [lobul‿awbu] 'the white wolf' or lobun albun [lobũn‿awbũ] 'a white wolf'.

The definite and indefinite articles are wholly fused to the noun; the bare form of the noun is obsolete except as the vocative. The semantic distribution of the definite and indefinite is quite different from English; speakers always provide the definite singular as the citation form, except for proper names of humans and similar animates, which are cited in the vocative.

Notes:

1: The vocative is not really definite, but it is traditionally grouped with the definite in grammatical texts.

2: The nominative and accusative of the neuter singular feature a schwa that appears preconsonantally and triggers gemination of the following consonant, e.g. gwovule magnul [gwovuləm‿maɲu] 'the big egg'.

3: The "intrusive schwa" also appears on the dative of the neuter singular for some speakers, but this is considered nonstandard.

Also, here is a table showing those words around the late middle ages or the dawn of the early modern era, with spellings typical of the period. Variant case-forms are given. As you can see, the digraphs <ign> and <igl> for the palatal nasal and lateral were eventually simplified to <gn> in the modern era.

[mèþru]

I'd love to see an in-depth explanation of the evolution
Where does this take place?

[missals]

I'd love to see an in-depth explanation of the evolution
Where does this take place?

Unfortunately I didn't write down any detailed notes, the whole thing came to me in a couple hours of inspiration. I admittedly probably won't do much more with it for the time being.

It wasn't anything special, though - just the article ille affixed to nouns, with intervocalic voicing, apocope, a round of palatalization, some epentheses, then another round of palatalization and l-vocalization. Roughly. Plus a couple of analogical changes.

I wasn't really sure where it ought to be set - I was thinking maybe the coastal Danube delta, thus isolated enough from Romanian (till the coming of the modern Romanian state) to develop quite divergently, with increased contact with Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish to help it keep a larger case system. But then, I gave it a Western Romance vowel system. Maybe the Adriatic?

[mèþru]

I lke to group family trees based on the earliest shared changes. If that puts it in Western Romance, maybe they started out as a colony or were displaced from somewhere in the West and went East? Or maybe they are like Sardinian, the last remnant of a family separate from the rest of Romance?