Re: Alternative history - a plea!

[raybrown@macline.co.uk (Raymond A. Brown)]

At 2:48 pm 16/4/98, John Cowan wrote:
>Eo yscrifef:
>
>> Quite so, but probably not without leaving some interesting traces on
>> the *langue d'oil*, which I am not competent to reconstruct.
>
>But I posted too quickly.  Frank George Valoczy has just posted on
>Conlang about his Brzhoneg (spelling?), the Latin-derived Celtic
>substrate lang of Prydain-Fuin.  This is too good an opportunity
>to lose.  So the Brzhoneg-speakers have held out, perhaps not too
>well, against Standard French despite its being much less of a
>language barrier, which suggests that maybe Occitan has held out too.

Yeah - but you'd have to change the history of France quite a bit,
methinks.  The one thing that united both the French monarchy and the
revolutionary republicans was the notion that France has "natural
boundaries: Pyrrhenees, Jura Mts, Alps, the Rhine & the Atlantic Ocean.
Everything inside this area must be _French_.  It's only very recently that
the French state has taken a more enlightened view towards Breton &
Occitan.

>(I'm a modern American, and I favor multicultural states.

So do I - I want to see the old nation states of Europe go & the new Europe
to be a conferation of regions.

>Maybe France *There* isn't quite so centralizing as *Here*: the
>collapse of Occitan didn't really come till after the Revolution.)

Quite so - and it was the revolutionaries that closed down the old Breton
parliament.

This reminds me that two years or so back someone was engaged in another
alternative history/ language project.  This imagined Muslims actually
establishing themselves in Provance and a romance influenced Arabic lang
developing there.  It was one of our female colleagues, but I don't recall
which one now.

Ray.

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Written in Net English        Humor not necessarily marked

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