Having completed a course called "The Slavic peoples and
languages" -- an Ãœbersichtskurs if ever there was one --
and started the first non-beginners course in Russian
grammar (for the second time as a nasty lung infection kept
me home with my son for many weeks the last two semesters)
has gotten me thinking about Slvanjek again.

1) One thing I'm clear about is that I want a Slavic-like
tense and aspect system, i.e. most of all with the past
tense from the past participle. But then one would need
something else to function as participles in two tenses
and two voices, and I have come up with a scheme to get
all that from attested (Vulgar) Latin material: the past
tense from the -ATUS participle, then for the forms
synchronically functioning as such:

- the present active from -ANDO or -ANTE i.e. no need
for any innovation.
- the present passive from -ATURUS, a reasonable change
of meaning when the substrate lang has no future
participle.
- the past active from -ATIVUS and
- the past passive from -ATICUS.

As for gerunds they can be derived from Latin adverbial
forms -ANTER and -ATICE, rather than from the Latin
gerund; -ATICUS forms will have the third balatalization
of C and -ATICE forms will have the second
palatalization. The only thing that possibly worries me
with this scheme is that - ATIVUS, -ATICUS, and -ATICE
forms properly derive not from second declension pp's in
-ATUS but from fourth declension action nouns in -ATUS,
but seeing how the second and fourth declension merge in
Vulgar Latin such a 'reassignment' at the hands of
substrate speakers doesn't seem unreasonable to me. To be
sure OCS had a different, more PIE tense sysytem, but it
seems reasonable that Slavo-Romance would follow the flow
of the Slavic languages, and so come up with something
like this, notwithstanding the highly Romance- style
verbal system of Rumanian
: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_verbs>
After all Slvanjek is supposed to be more 'deeply'
Slavicized than Rumanian.

2) I'm more convinced than ever that there must be an
adverbial form in -o derived from the Latin neuter
ablative with implied MODO. The first person singular of
the verb will still have -u, perhaps by analogy with SUM
> *so~ > su (yes I know it's weak...)

3) I've also come to the conclusion that I'd much rather
derive the long adjective from postposed ILLE than from
IS, which properly shouldn't exist in Vulgar Latin. The
true way to do that is of course by having Vulgar Latin
LJ become j, as in Rumanian. I figure there will be a
secondary lj later from

- LI(N/LI(M, LE~ > lja,
- LI(VO > ljo,
- LI(VU > lju

of course

- JUBEO > JUVJO > julju,
- LIBITUM > LIB'TU > LIUTU > ljut, and likewise
- DEBITUM > djut/dziut.

not to speak of LE(, LE:, LI( > lje against LU( > le.
Perhaps I will not get a lot of lj this way, but I
will get more intervocalic j.s, which Latin provides
far too few.

4) I'm thinking of developing an instrumental from postposed
CUM, like Spanish gets _con migo_ from CUM MECUM. I don't
know if it's Good or bad that -CU(M) would end up
sometimes as -c and sometimes as -k depending on the
declension, but I'm leaning towards seeing it as Good.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
c'est qu'elles meurent." (Victor Hugo)