Romancing The Lex

Roll Your Own Romance Lexicon

Duncan Duchov has kindly taken a Latin lexical file I compiled from several sources and prepared it for use with LangMaker/Win. He welcomes comments and corrections.

Introduction, Latin LEX File, Latin HTML File

Dear Mr. Henning:

Please let me explain basically what I did to the dictionary that you sent to me. I changed the verbs to their infinitive forms and changed the nouns and adverbs into their nominative masculine forms; I hope to explain why shortly.

There were some errors in the text that you mailed me, and I hope that I caught them all; they were generally small. There were also a few odd translations, so I tried to polish them up a bit; some may have been technically correct but made me laugh aloud (the one that sticks in my mind is 'swimming pool' for piscina), so I changed them too.

As a side note, I tried to change the British English forms into American English forms, for there was a mixing in the text (probably an American drawing from a British source).

The words that ended up in the final file were chosen in a rather arbitrary manner, by me and of course by the individual who first compiled the dictionary. Some of his/her words I omitted, for various reasons, and I added quite a number of my own. Hopefully the selection would be enough for a common Roman citizen to make it through the day without resorting to circumlocution too frequently, but I am sure that I've missed something here and there.

I intended for the vocabulary to reflect what would be used sometime after Augustus died, having drawn some foreign words from non-Latin sources, but before the language had assimilated too much alien matter or started to become vulgar. Not that I believe that it should be 'pure', but I feel that an earlier form might be the most useful of all the possible choices, and give users options. These details can be noted in such words as Julius for 'July' and Augustus for 'August' (instead of the older names for the months), and the adoption from the Celts of the word sapo but not yet caballus. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that you get the point.

If anyone feels that they need to add, delete, or change vocabulary because they require a different source material, tell 'em to go nuts. One of the largest problems I had in compiling the file was trying to find a middle ground in what I imagined it would be used for. I presume that a good portion of the downloads will be used to create one of two things: languages for a Dark/Middle Ages RPG setting - which would need words for items such as swords and torches - and languages for a modern-day or futuristic alternative reality where Romans had conquered the world or at least held a large portion of it. In the latter case, the language maker might need vocabulary such as 'automobile' but have no true need for 'torch.' Therefore I tried to make it pretty non-specific, but there is a slant toward RPG-possible words in there, and no truly 'modern' ones. Again, let people add what they need; I'm just trying to hit a common denominator.

As I have informed you, I included the infinitives of the verbs and the masculine nominative forms of the nouns. This may be a vocabulary skeleton crew, and almost goes against the very feeling of Latin, but I feel that adding anything more might result in confusion rather than clarification. The prime reason for my decision is that, as you know, the Romance languages have changed in grammar proportionally more than they have in vocabulary. It seems to have been a trend, for example, for the Latin-based languages to lose the nominative plural and assume in its place a version of the accusative case. So if I were to have typed in all of the nominative plural endings, they would probably end up being changed anyway. Even worse, a language maker might feel that he should keep all the cases and conjugations. Cute, but Latin-based languages didn't work like that. Instead, they grew from the infinitives and the nominative case. There is no doubt in my mind that anyone who intends to design his own truly Romance tongue will need not only a book of Latin grammar, but also books of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Only then will be able to get an idea of how the language changed over the millennia into the versions we now know.

What would Romanian be without brinza, adopted from the Dacians? Would a Frenchman seem right if he said anything other than tete? It seems obvious that the most difficult part of a new Romance language would be the grammar. What cases were lost? Were new ones formed? What foreign terms were adopted? After that deciding all of that, the vocab becomes easy... or relatively so...

Obviously, there are errors in this file. I am not a native Latin speaker, I often worked from my head, and I am by no means a professional. But I do think that the dictionary is generally O.K. - there shouldn't be any horrible, glaring errors. Feel free to check it over yourself, and edit it as you feel fit. And if anyone notices any errors, please have them get back to me - I'm as eager to learn about them as the pickiest nit picker that ever picked nits is. When it comes to things like this, I feel that perfection is a must.

And as a last note, I realize that there are no indicators for stress or vowel length. I tried to keep it simple, to avoid unnecessary complexity and errors. I hope that you agree with my judgment...

Jeffrey Henning wrote:

> Someone put a comment on the LangMaker forum that Romance nouns were taken
> from the accusative. Comments?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jeffrey Henning
> LangMaker.com - Invent Your Own Language
> Jeffrey.Henning.com - Croatian Notation, Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio for
> Windows

Dear Mr. Henning:

As I have said before, I am no expert on the Romance languages. I haven't
visited the forum, so I'm not sure about the comment exactly, but the point made
might very well be true. Likewise, it might be untrue - without sources, nobody
can tell. Needless to say, this is a detail that could impact virtually all of
the Latin-based conlangs created.

I am reasonably certain that the plural forms of Romance nouns were often or
always taken from the Latin accusative case. I have attached a few sources that
have led me to believe this to this letter; feel free to make of them what you
will. I had not heard before the idea that the singular forms of the nouns were
also taken from the Latin accusative, and don't have any material that
contradicts that claim. The only reason that I had never assumed such a thing
is by looking at words the descendants of Latin, which often seem to be
near-direct duplicates of their distant ancestors: take the Spanish 'casa,' for
example, from the Latin 'casa.' On the other hand this means nothing: the
accusative form of the Latin 'casa,' for example, is 'casam' - and many scholars
dedicated to restoring Classical Latin pronunciation (e.g. Stephen Daitz) seem
to feel that the final 'm' in Latin was pronounced as a nasal, not as an m
proper. Therefore 'casam' would have been pronounced as 'cas' followed a
nasalized 'a,' and its only a short phonetic step to reach 'casa' again. And
take 'liber,' which became the French 'livre'; it certainly sounds as though it
could have come from 'librum.' I am inclined to believe the post is factual to
some degree, perhaps completely.

The most important question is this: how does this effect us here and now with
regards to this .lex file? Well, unless you try to fool around with the final
'm' in the 1st-Declension Feminine nouns that end in 'a,' they should be O.K.
'Terra' will yield 'terra' again. Unfortunately the other nouns will not fare
nearly as well: 'ager' becomes 'agrum,' and a heap of confusion forms. Some
might be all right, depending on how you transform them: 'amicus,' accusative
'amicum,' will be fine if you drop the final letter in both cases (the worst pun
ever.) Hence the Spanish 'amigo.'

Unfortunately, I don't have the time right now to decline all of the nouns in
the dictionary. I wish that I did. If you know anyone who would like to take
the initiative to do so, tell them to feel free - they might be helping a lot of
people.

And please: if you know anyone that has any sources that could help to clear up
this matter - historical grammars or whatnot - please have these people refer us
to them , or better yet have them type away and you can post them. This is a
community, and manus manum lavat. (Odd example in that last sentence: Spanish
uses 'manos' for hand, right? Hunh? Now I'm confused.)

I wish I could be more helpful here; unfortunately, I'm not much of a Romance
scholar. I haven't even used the Latin .lex, and probably won't for awhile.
(To be honest, I'm more interested in Celtic and Slavic languages.) Sorry!
Please keep me informed!

Sincerely,
Duncan Duchov
kula@totalnetnh.net

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is English a creole?

The change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English (loss of gender and of case
inflection, phonological change, acquisition of a huge stock of French and
Latin vocabulary) is certainly dramatic, and has led some sci.lang posters,
and even some linguists (e.g. Domingue, Bailey & Maroldt, Milroy) to the
provocative postulation that English suffered pidginization or creolization
at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) or at the time of the Norse
invasions (from 865), or both.

This hypothesis, as Sarah Grey Thomason and Terence Kaufman have shown in
Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988), rests on an
incomplete understanding of creolization and a shaky grasp on the history
of English. There is a wide range of language contact situations, from
casual contact to deep structural interference; English is by no means the
most striking of these cases. It looks like a creole only if one ignores
this range of phenomena and calls any case of moderate structural
interference a case of creolization.

For many of the changes in question, the chronology does not work out. For
instance, the reduction of unstressed vowels to /@/, largely responsible
for the loss of Old English nominal declensions, had taken place before the
Conquest, and affected all of England, including areas never settled by the
Norse. And English did absorb an immense amount of French and Latin
vocabulary, but most of this occurred well after the Conquest-- past 1450,
two centuries after the nobility ceased to be French-speaking.

Other points to note: 1) most of the simplifications and foreign borrowings
seen in English occurred as well in other Germanic languages, notably
Dutch, Low German, and the Scandinavian languages; 2) a particularly
striking borrowing from Norse, the pronoun 'they', was probably adopted to
avoid what otherwise would have been a merger of 'he/him' with 'they/them';
3) the total number of French-speaking invaders was not more than 50,000,
compared to an English-speaking population of over 1.5m-- nowhere near the
proportions that would threaten the normal inheritance of English.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LINGUIST List 2.639

Thu 10 Oct 1991

Message 4: plural data

Date: Wed, 09 Oct 91 21:08:53 EDT
From: <JAREA@UKCC.uky.edu>
Subject: plural data

Many people who may have less Latin that Jonson attributed to Shaxper
continue to be overheated about the use of 'data' as a singular. In
Latin this form was the neuter plural (nominative and accusative) while
'datum' was the nominative and accusative singular. These people feel
that to 'misuse' a plural like 'data' as a singular, taking singular
demonstratives and verbs, does violence to Latin, and thus to English.
If these people knew more about Latin, they would realize that already
in Classical Latin such second declension neuter plurals were often
used as singulars syntactically, sometimes with collective force as is
clearly the situation with 'data'. Further, the Romance languages have
carried this further, so that it is not at all unusual for one Romance
language to take the singular of these former neuters as a singular, and
make a new (masculine) plural, and for another RL to take the neuter plural
as a singular, creating a new (feminine) plural. There are also traces of
this in other Indo-European languages, leading one to suspect that the same
situation held in part for PIE (whatever that was). For Latin, a handy
reference might be Ernout, _Morphologie historique du latin_ #2A, or for
Romance treatments Rohlfs _Grammatica storica della lingua italiana...:
v.2 Morfologia #384. Let us not stand in the way of an historical process
that has been under way for millenia (My god, there's another one of those
wretched neuter plurals!)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LINGUIST List 5.971

Thu 08 Sep 1994

Message 1: Summary: plurals in '-s'

Date: Thu, 08 Sep 1994 16:25:45 Summary: plurals in '-s'
From: <GGALE@VAX1.UMKC.EDU>
Subject: Summary: plurals in '-s'

On August 18, I threw out the following question to the list:

A colleague who makes his living as a translator of technical dox asked
me something yesterday that I couldn't answer. "But", I told him, "I bet I
know where to find some folks who CAN answer.!" So, folks, here it is:
"How did it come about that Western European languages such as
English, French, Spanish and Portuguese have chosen to make most
plural words by adding an 's' or 'es' to the singular? Italian, Greek,
German, and, I believe, the Slavic languages do not do this. Latin did not
either."

Herewith, a compilation of responses to this question.
++++++++

With respect to the Romance languages, the answers generally went like
this:

A partial answer wrt Romance. First of all, the "Latin did not either" bit
is incorrect. Most accusative plurals ended in -AS, -OS, or -ES - and
that's where the Western Romance languages got their plural -s from. In
Italian, it seems the nominative plural endings (-AE, -I, -ES) were
generalised and passed on to the accusatives.The class of plurals in -ES
was eventually redistributed over the two others, which gives you the
modern Italian situation of plurals in -e and in -i. All Romance
languages, as far as I know, continued the accusative forms only, except
in some marginal cases.
++++++++
The Slavic answer was pretty straightforward:

They do not occur in Slavic at all. Proto Slavic went through a period
when all syllables become open, hence word final (syllable final) s was
lost.
You might try the Baltic languages which didn't go through that.
Everything seems to end in 's' in Latvian.
++++++++

With respect to English, answers of the following sort were typical:

Actually the Latin accusative plurals and dative and ablative plurals
in all genders ended in -s. In early English, when it was still an
inflected language using many of the Latin endings, the vowel endings
dropped as time went on. This meant that the only distinguishing
feature separating plural from singular nouns was the -s termination.
So, English did get it from Latin (Greek had -s plurals too).
++++++++

A fairly complete answer went like this:

Just saw your query on Linguist. The answer is historical accident,
in that Proto-Indo-European had a number of plural types in -s, which
have survived in various shapes in different groups within the larger
family. E.g. Old English had a set of plurals in -as, which are the
source of our modern -s plurals, and this -s- element also appears
in Latin in some declensions. A contributing factor to the
preservation of these is that many other plural types were marked by
vowels or nasals, and these tended to drop in some languages. But
many languages in the groups don't use the -s plurals: e.g. Italian
has retained vowel plurals (-o sg vs. -i pl for masculines, -a sg vs.
-e pl for feminines), and Icelandic and Swedish don't use the -s
either, but later developments in -r, among other things. The secret
is which of the ancestral plural types happened to get generalized.
(E.g. also German doesn't use -s much except in special vocabulary,
while Dutch does more, and Afrikaans still more, to take another
subfamily). Hope this is of some use.
++++++++

Some were as intrigued as my colleague was:

Romance -s stems from Vulgar Latin, not Classical Latin, and is
generally (I think) held to derive from Classical Latin accusative forms in
-es, -as, -os etc. English -s is a loan from French, the Germanic plural
in English being seen today only in the marginal cases like feet and oxen
(ah, but WHY???).
Note the increase in -s plurals in Dutch (phonologically determined) and
German (morphologically and phonologically determined: die
Autos, die UFOs), the first (I presume) French influence, the second
possibly English influence.
++++++++

And my final correspondent even put in a nice cite:

Middle English (1100-1500) -s or -es comes from the strong declension,
-en from the weak. Old English had some plurals in -as, which became
-es in Middle English.

The -(e)s plural spread rapidly in the North of England, becoming the
norm in the Midlands by 1200. In 14th c., it became the norm all over
England.

See Baugh, A Hist. of the English Language, 2nd ed.,
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957, pp. 191-192 for full explanation.
++++++++

Thanks are due to all my respondents:

Evan Smith, Laurie.BAUER
Margaret Winters ROGER@beattie.uct.ac.za
Adger Williams Leslie Barrett
Lee Hartman Bert.Peeters
M. Picard Richard DeArmond
Pat Crowe Donald Hook
Michael Covington

I hope everyone else finds this as interesting as I did.

George Gale
Philosophy & Physical Science
U. MO K.C.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LINGUIST List 6.1436

Mon Oct 16 1995

...

Well I can't speak to the situation of the sciences or humanities
in general, but its hard to see any signs of the process in our own field.
It's true that there are a lot of nonlinguist participants in the
discussions on the Linguist List, some of them from neighboring
disciplines, some of them just kibitzers who have wandered in off the
street. But with occasional exceptions, these participants haven't had much
effect in shifting the discursive center of gravity. On the contrary, net
discussions seem to rely on those "specialized commonplaces of disciplinary
discourse" even more than other kinds of disciplinary colloquy do, if only
because the medium tends to obscure or eliminate the institutional roles
and safeguards that ordinarily invest a written communication with
authority. There was a telling example on the Linguist List a few months
ago, when a philosopher wrote in a query on behalf of a friend:

A colleague who makes his living as a translator of technical dox asked me
something yesterday that I couldn't answer. "But", I told him, "I bet I
know where to find some folks who CAN answer.!" So, folks, here it is:
"How did it come about that Western European languages such as English,
French, Spanish and Portuguese have chosen to make most plural words by
adding an 's' or 'es' to the singular? Italian, Greek, German, and, I
believe, the Slavic languages do not do this. Latin did not either."

A month or so later, the questioner posted a summary
of answers, which included all of the following:

English -s is a loan from French, the Germanic plural in English being seen
today only in the marginal cases like feet and oxen....

Actually the Latin accusative plurals and dative and ablative plurals in
all genders ended in -s. In early English, when it was still an inflected
language using many of the Latin endings, the vowel endings dropped as time
went on. This meant that the only distinguishing feature separating plural
from singular nouns was the -s termination. So, English did get it from
Latin...

The answer is historical accident, in that Proto-Indo-European had a number
of plural types in -s, which have survived in various shapes in different
groups within the larger family. E.g. Old English had a set of plurals in
-as, which are the source of our modern -s plurals, and this -s- element
also appears in Latin in some declensions...7

Sit penem lectorem fides. The writer had indeed found some folks who could
answer his colleague's question, the problem being that he apparently had
no way of telling them from the linguistic wannabes who happened to be
sitting in on the discussion. You think of an American who shows up at a
party in Paris speaking high-school French, unable to discern the accents
that mark off half the other guests as Americans, as well.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Popular Latin language

Latin was spoken too widely in Europe, Africa and Asia. It was carried there
constantly by Italian colonists who brought their tongue with them and
assimilated gradually aboriginal nations. That is how linguistic mixtures
appear. But it is not the way Popular Latin appeared first. Classical Latin
began to suffer changes in colloquial language already in the last centuries
BC, when Rome finally managed to conquer all Italy. The Italics, who spoke
Umbrian, Oscan, Volscian etc., mixed slowly with Latin colonists.
This caused serious changes in the spoken language. The process of simplification and analitization began at that time. Endings
of nouns and verbs began to be dropping everywhere, phonetics began
changing a little, and even the dictionary acquired more new words with
parallel loss of previously used. Some progressive features of Umbrian
became now a part of Latin.

But the flourishing epoch of Popular Latin began when Roman colonists faced
Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Illyrian and Iberian lands and peoples. Here
mixing with so various nations turned Latin into varieties of dialects, and
it's them that are called Popular Latin. It existed on vast territories of
Europe since the 2nd century and till the 6th century AD, until it turned
into national Romance languages: Old French (Langue d'oil), Old Provencal
(langue d'oc), Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Rumantsch etc. Nowadays
Romance languages are numerous, with numerous dialectal groups, but the
source was only one - Popular Latin.

Great phonetic changes were one of the main features of Popular Latin. New
sounds appeared (like [dj], [j], [sh], [ch], sibilants, aspirants, dentals
like [th], [ts]), diphthongs almost disemerged, final consonant dropped
practically everywhere.

Such phonetic revolution led to grammar changes. Popular Latin carried a
tendency to an uninflected language. From the six Latin noun cases, only 3
or 4 (in pronouns) remained here, and afterwards even 2 cases, for other
cases were expressed simply by prepositional nouns - the way it is done now
in English and French. The definite (from demonstrative pronoun ille) and
indefinite (from numeral unus) appeared, as well as the 3rd person personal
pronouns which Latin lacked. They also were formed from demonstrative
pronouns. The verb system, so terribly complicated in Latin, was altered,
and since then auxiliary verbs started expressing perfect, preterite,
plusquamperfect and future forms. The only thing that was preserved was the
infect verbal endings.

Popular Latin with all its varieties has much in common everywhere among
Romance languages, but the dialectal features depend on the region, on the
nation which used to live here before Romans came and assimilated it.

Jeffrey.Henning.com

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