Hyperfrench

From Linguifex
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Hyperfrench (rug Nyvierfusiez, literally "Modern French" <- langue nouvelle française) is a language of Irta's France. It is notable for being the least conservative Indo-European language in Irta, grammatically.

Timeline

Around 1300 Irtan Parisian French started evolving very rapidly, around the fifteenth century it had a similar aesthetic to our timeline's Modern French. Around the seventeenth century there was another huge series of sound shifts (including a chain shift l -> r -> h, vowel shifts and Havlik's law) as well as grammatical shifts due to the loss of prestige of Literary French in Irta. Today's Hyperfrench is a quasi-polysynthetic language with clitic complexes and bipersonal agreement, very unusual for Indo-European.

Modern Hyperfrench has lots of loans from Irish, Brythonic, Riphic and English, the latter including many reborrowed Old French words.

Phonology

Hyperfrench is unique among IE languages outside India for having a four-way phonation distinction in stops (both voicing and aspiration are contrastive). Otherwise its phonology is Standard Average European.

The sound /l/, curiously, does not appear in native words in Hyperfrench, having been entirely replaced by /r/. /l/ does show up in loanwords, though.

Numbers

resier, redi, rethva, rekath, resiak, resis, resiet, revyt, renief, redis

rezuz, redyz, rethvasidis, rekasidis, resiaksidis, residis, resietsidis, revytsidis, reniefsidis, revia (rethiez, rekatoz, and rečaz are old words for 13, 14 and 15)

Nouns

Hyperfrench completely lost pluralization, due to unpredictable/koineized sound changes involving yers and analogy.

Noun gender in Hyperfrench is vestigial. Adjective agreement disappeared except in very specific instances which are analyzed by modern Hyperfrench grammarians as remnants of univerbation rather than agreement.

A few adjectives display alternations that etymologically derive from gender but because of Riphic substrate influence they evolved into an attributive vs predicative distinction: s vati nyvier "the new car" vs s vati ie nyvo "the car is new", somewhat like in German.

Pronouns

nom, gen

1sg: ma, nema

2sg: tva, detva

1pl: u, du

2pl: vy, devy

Syntax

More satellite-framed than French as we know it (because of Irish and English)