Rhomanian

NOTE: Not to be confused with Romanian!

Rhomanian is a Hellenic language spoken by the and the sole official language of. It is also spoken by minority populations in neighboring countries. 225 million people are reported to speak Rhomanian to an extent in 2020 according to a worldwide census, 192 million as native speakers, and 33 million whose native language is not Rhomanian, but exert some fluency in the language to an extent.

The Hellenic languages were spread to the New World following the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, when two brothers and several hundred Byzantine peasants arrived to the New World via Portuguese caravels, when the brothers lied to the Portuguese that they were going south to Africa. The crew got lost in a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic, where several people were killed. The crew finally settled in OTL's Delmarva Peninsula, near the OTL's location of Washington D.C. The Greek spoken in the New World fell in mutual intelligibility to the Greek spoken in the Balkans very quickly, and Rhomanian became a seperate language by the turn of the 15th century, due to the strong influence of the Native Americans in the area.

The Rhomanians enjoyed peace and prosperity until the, often regarded in North America as a branch of the Seven Years' war, where Great Britain, allied with Vinland, conquered all of Rhomania and imposed lots of taxes on the Rhomanian population until the , which led to the in 1776. Therefore, Rhomanian also incorporated a lot of English loanwords and grammar. Rhomanian is now mutually unintelligable to the Greek spoken in Europe.

Consonants
* Unwritten glottal stops only occur where a null-onset syllable used to exist.

** <ğ> in the romanization used to be pronounced as /ɣ/, but was lost, and now lengthens the previous sound.

Phonotactics
Syllable structure is (S)C(R)V(R)(C), where S represents a sibilant, R represents any liquid, C represents any consonant, and V is any vowel. When C is in an onset consonant cluster, all obstruents except sibilants are allowed. Onsets are mandatory in Rhomanian, and when a null onset existed in Medieval Greek, or when the voiced velar fricative loss created a null-onset, an unwritten glottal stop is in the onset. The glottal stop is not allowed in the coda, and /ŋ/ is not allowed in the onset.

Stress System
Stress in Rhomanian is the hardest part for new learners. When the stress doesn't fall on the penultimate syllable, a tonos is used to mark it.

How to determine stress for a Rhomanian noun, adjective, or adverb:

 * Prefixes and suffixes cannot be stressed.
 * Syllables which contain an r-colored vowel cannot be stressed.
 * If all syllables in a root have an r-colored coda, then stress goes to the last syllable with an r-colored vowel.
 * Otherwise, stress goes to the penultimate syllable of the root. Compounds have stress go to the first root in the compound.

How to determine stress for a Rhomanian verb
Stress goes to the first r-colored syllable in the verb. Otherwise, it goes to the penultimate syllable.

Writing System
Rhomanian uses the Greek alphabet and is mostly phonemic. However, there are still irregularities.

Grammar
Rhomanian grammar consists of:


 * A Greek base
 * Amerindian influence
 * Vinlandian influence
 * Strong English influence

Case and Gender
Rhomanian maintains most of the cases from Medieval Greek, but has lost the vocative case. The genitive case is now also used for the lost vocative case.

In terms of gender, Rhomanian has completely lost the neuter gender entirely, merging with masculine or feminine depending on the ending.

Declensions 1 and 2: Masculine nouns
Masculine nouns must end with -ως (-os) or -ας (-as).

Declensions 3 and 4: Feminine nouns
Feminine nouns must end in -ις (-is) or -α (-a).

Articles
Rhomanian has two articles: indefinate and definate. They don't agree in gender and case with the following noun, but they do agree with number.

Agglutination
Rhomanian is generally analytic. However, it accepts agglutinative compounds that are more than 100 characters long in the orthography.

R-Harmony
When a syllable in the root contains a coda /r/, it spreads to every vowel in the word. This can be blocked by prenasalized stops and consonant clusters.

Verbs
Rhomanian has a very complex verb system. Verbs can belong to one of 15 different conjugations, as word-final vowels were lost except in monosyllabic words and now only surface in the ending, plus R-Harmony, where a word with a coda -r in the root spreads the coda -r to every syllable in the word, although this is blocked by approximants and stress. Even fluent native speakers can have difficulties finding the correct conjugation for every verb. Unfortunately, the only way to get around this is a dose of brute-force memorization.

The Regular Person Endings
The regular person ending is based on the regular endings in Medieval Greek, with the passive endings being used for the copula, also as in Medieval Greek, as the distinction between passive and active was lost early on in Rhomanian's history. However, a new passive construction evolved that requires the speaker to switch the subject with the verb in an attempt to mimic English's passive construction.

Verb Conjugations
The regular conjugation for verbs in Rhomanian are roughly equivelant to the first conjugation in its European sister language, but with some simplifications and the addition of extra particles derived from nouns. The infinitive evolved from a subordinating particle that shifted in meaning due to English influence.

Syntax
Rhomanian has fairly free word order, but tends towards VOS. SOV is prohibited as a possible word order because it is the word order for passive constructions.