AHC: Plausible Slavo-Romance language

Gian

Banned
Exactly what it says in the tin.

A language based on Vulgar Latin, but with a Slavic substrate.

PoD is around 100 AD, and Romanian doesn't count for the purposes of the OP.
 

katchen

Banned
Well let's face it, the Slavonic people who became the Serbo-Croatians stopped moving west just short of the Julian Alps. If they had kept going across the Julian Alps they would have invaded and occupied at least northern and perhaps the whole of Italy. There were certainly a great deal more of them than there were Lombards. Perhaps enough to shift the language of Italy to a slavic base if they had migrated to Italy in the 800s. Perhaps in that case, the entire Balkans up to Bulgaria and Albania would have become Magyar.
 
Exactly what it says in the tin.

A language based on Vulgar Latin, but with a Slavic substrate.

PoD is around 100 AD, and Romanian doesn't count for the purposes of the OP.

And perhaps Romanian is the example that makes this a near impossibility. All the OTL Romances are spoken by peoples whose historical ancestors already lived in those areas when the Empire fell. With the exception of the Lombards, the barbarian settlement of the West was done by 476, and the Franks, Goths, and others were subsumed into a culture that was still massively Latin speaking. By the time the Slavs begin arriving in the East, those areas where romanum rusticum was still spoken saw those people pushed aside, forced into the mountains and unproductive areas by the newcomers. That Romanian survived this marginalisation to become a national language is pretty amazing, given how few speakers remain of the other languages of the Latin East.
 
Romanian is pretty much this. A romance language with a lot of slavic hybrids.

Not really. The slavic elements in Romanian are mainly vocab (apart from the numeral system, which is unique). The grammar and syntax are inherently Romance. In a lot of ways, Romanian is like English. Both languages saw a huge amount of borrowing from the languages of the people who ruled them for centuries, but the borrowings tend to be specifically focussed. Urban life, military, government, wealth and prestige, these tend to be the areas that see the most borrowing, whereas the home, the family, the land, the farm, the church, these areas tended to see the least amount of borrowing.
 
Not really. ....In a lot of ways, Romanian is like English. Both languages saw a huge amount of borrowing from the languages of the people who ruled them for centuries.

But isnt English exactly the model the OP is looking at? Because, there are darned few languages in the would that are more hybridized than English, well except for Pidgins/Creoles.
 
Not really. The slavic elements in Romanian are mainly vocab (apart from the numeral system, which is unique). The grammar and syntax are inherently Romance. In a lot of ways, Romanian is like English. Both languages saw a huge amount of borrowing from the languages of the people who ruled them for centuries, but the borrowings tend to be specifically focussed. Urban life, military, government, wealth and prestige, these tend to be the areas that see the most borrowing, whereas the home, the family, the land, the farm, the church, these areas tended to see the least amount of borrowing.

And is it different from the relation of the other Romance Languages and their Germanic Substrate? This is pretty much the definition of Linguistic Substrate. Most part of the "artificial" borrowings in Romanian are the French ones from the 19th century. Before that, they even used the "slavic alphabet" - Cyrillic alphabet.
 
Ok, here's a completely different suggestion:

Genoa had colonies in Crimea from the 13th century, around the same time the Mongols were arriving in the land that used to be Kievan Rus. What if there was a flood of East Slavic speaking refugees from Kievan Rus to these Genoese colonies. Maybe an enduring Christian (I'm not sure if they would be Catholic or Orthodox) state could be founded in Crimea with a Genoese upper/middle class and East Slavic underclass. After about 500 years, you'll start to see a Slavo-Romance language developing...
 
And is it different from the relation of the other Romance Languages and their Germanic Substrate? This is pretty much the definition of Linguistic Substrate. Most part of the "artificial" borrowings in Romanian are the French ones from the 19th century. Before that, they even used the "slavic alphabet" - Cyrillic alphabet.

Medieval Romanian burrowed Slavic vocabulary for trade, livestock, legal terms and of course the church (which used Chruch Slavonic as a liturgical language).

Modern Romanian was "cleaned up" a lot, same as Czech was purged of some Germanisms by borrowing the Russian words instead (during the Liberal Revolutions), and the Ottoman language became Turkish after purging Persian and Quranic vocabulary from everyday use (after WW1). That was a late 19th c. development for Romania.

So I am in complete agreement with you, if Romanian isn't an example, what is?
 

Gian

Banned
So I am in complete agreement with you, if Romanian isn't an example, what is?

What I had in mind was a Romance language similar to Wenedyk: a Romance language based on a Slavic language.

That's why Romanian doesn't count for the purposes of the challenge.
 
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