Neo-Teutonic, the prototyping Language

The construction of Frenkisch is based the methodology of Interlingua de IAL. However it doesn’t follow the prototyping method of Interlingua exactly.

In this I post will compare the proto-typing method of Interlingua with Frenkisch. And propose a novel and different scheme to that used by Frenkisch (and other attempts at a pan-Germanic auxiliary language)

Interlingua words are based on the Etymological Prototype. Which is basically the ancestral point from which the forms in the various source languages branched out. This means that it retains any conservative features preserved in any one of the source languages. For example, take the Interlingua word foco meaning fire or focus. It is based on French feu, Spanish fuego, Portuguese fogo and Italian fuoco. These words all originally come from Latin focus.

None of the source languages retain the Latin -us ending, So the common point of branching is not -us but the next most conservative ending, o. So the IL word ends in -o. Next, the final consonant of the stem. In French, it’s lost, in Spanish and Port it’s evolved to a g. Italian retains the Latin c,. The point from which the French and Port. and Spanish consonants branched was a c. If the Latin c had evolved into another sound before it then branched into the various Romance versions, then that evolved sound would be the point of common branching rather than the exact Latin sound. The most conservative final consonant for the IL word is c. Next the vowel of the stem. In French, the vowel has changed to eu. In Spanish it’s become ue and in Italian it’s uo. Portuguese retains what is most like the Latin o. The common point from which these vowels branched is o. So the IL word has a o vowel in the stem. Next the initial consonant. Obviously it the same f as in Latin! So it’s F+O+C+O = IL foco. The prototype doesn’t always have to be Latin. Let’s say all the source languages have a word like hotel. The prototype would be the French word hôtel. Even though French hôtel can be traced back earlier to Old French hostel and then to medieval Latin hospitale, the common point of branching for the word which means a largish commercial guest accommodation building for travelers, is the French word hôtel. That there is the Interlingua prototyping method in a nutshell.

Frenkisch doesn’t follow this method exactly, although it is the starting point. The hypothetical Etymological prototype for Frenkisch words would often be something like the Proto-Germanic (PG) form. However having words that resemble closely PG is arguably less useful than closely resembling Latin. Proto-Germanic is utterly dead. And it was never written down. However Latin never really died out. It continued a parallel zombie-like existence to the Romance language and was a constant influence on them and other Western languages. Not so for PG, it evolved into the Old Germanic dialects and didn’t continue on as a learned language like Latin. No languages are continuing to use PG as a source of words. Many of the common features in the Germanic languages group, are an inheritance from Proto-Germanic. But even-more so, the common features are because of later languages influencing each other and borrowing from each other and from the same Romance sources. To put it another way, many common Germanic linguistic features were never present in PG, they are later parallel innovations. For example constructions such as forgive/vergeven/vergeben are likely to be calques/loan-translations of Latin perdonare.

So Frenkisch words are modernized from their prototype. This modernization is that they are pseudo-evolved along the most common evolutionary pathway that the Germanic source languages have followed. So, if for example, most of our source languages have lost/merged the PG *þ phoneme, then so does Frenkisch. If in German, Dutch and English, the PG *ī phoneme has regularly become a very nearly identical diphthong,s then so do the Frenkisch equivalents. So let’s say we have in the Germanic source languages the words, English drive, Dutch drijven, German treiben, Danish/Norwegian drive and Swedish driva. Might this be a good basis for a Frenkisch word? It is. The prototype for those words would be the PG word *drīƀan. But the PG word is not the Frenkisch word. It has the most common evolutionary path pseudo-evolution applied to it. The *ī evolves to [aɪ], the *ƀ becomes a voiced labiodental fricative [v]. The infinitive *n is lost. The final vowel in the unstressed suffix is generalized to a schwa [ə]. So the PG word pseudo-evolves to Frenkisch [ˈdraɪvə], spelled dryve.

If the makers of Interlingua had followed a “modernization” method similar to that of Frenkisch, the language would not look so conservative  or Latin in form, it would look more like an average modern western Romance language, perhaps looking similar to Occitan/Langue d’oc or Catalan. Lingua Franca Nova has been decribed as resembling those languages in form.

Anyway, this brings me to the point of this long long post. What would a conlang that used the true etymological prototype of the modern Germanic languages look like? Would it really be less or more recognizable and instantly intelligible?

Note that the etymological prototype would not always be identical to the reconstructed PG form. All evolutions that were common to all the source languages, would be present in the prototypes. So changes such as some i-mutation, generalization of unstressed vowels to Schwa, merger of *hl and *l, *hr and *r, and some Ingvaeonic loss of nasals would be applied. Interlingua often resembles Vulgar Latin/Proto Romance in form, rather than classical Latin. These Germanic prototypes would be some kind of “Vulgar Proto Germanic”.

Now that biggest advantage to this language that I can see, is that PG had a much simpler vowel phonology than modern germlangs. It might make a language that is easier to learn the pronunciation for and possibly easier to devise a spelling system that needed no/less diacritical marks.

Next post on this topic, I shall experiment with a few sample words, a pronunciation and orthography scheme and method for borrowing Romance and Greek words.