this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Linguistics Humor

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You were on your way home when you died

Tu est sur tu via dorm et tu mort.

  • Tu: "Et tu, Brutus?"

  • Est: "id est" / i.e.

  • Dorm: dormitory/domestic

  • Et: "et cetera" / etc.

  • Mort: immortal

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless.

Id est uno vehicle accident. Null particularly remarkable, sed fatal ultimately.

  • Uno: uno cards

  • Sed: Latin for "but"

You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death.

Tu exit retro uno spouse et duo pedo. Id est uno mort sans pain.

  • Retro: retrospect

  • Pedo: p***phile

  • Sans: sans-serif

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[–] FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So basically 11th century Norman with Middle -> Modern English sound changes ahah.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not quite. Norman is a true Latin descendant; it starts with Late Latin grammar, then adds some sound and grammar changes. In the meantime, OP's conlang uses an English "base" grammar but replaces the native vocab with Classical Latin equivalents.

The difference is visible in cases like "id est uno vehicle accident". Norman would use ille→il and unum→(i)un, and odds are it already did so in Norman Conquest times (ditching is/ea/id, merging masculine with neuter, ditching vowels after /n/, those changes are so widespread that they were probably already in Western Late Latin).

Another difference is in the "tu est". English lacks second person conjugations, so it's using a third person one; a Norman descendant would use "tu es" (or rather "t'es") instead.

If you (or anyone here) is interested on what a British Romance language would look like, check Brithenig. It's more like a sister language to Norman than a descendant, and the conlanger added some Insular Celtic influence to spice things up, but it should give you a good idea.

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 2 points 2 days ago

You can get part of the way by just finding the morphological rules that govern how words in Latin-derived languages differ from loanwords in English, and applying them to words not borrowed into English. For example, the Italian word for timetable, “orario”, could yield the hypothetical English word “horary”.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

Is that not basically what Interlingua tried to do?

[–] mech@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Is there a translator or thesaurus for this?
It would be a great "Terran language" for a sci-fi campaign.

[–] skedye@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

unfortunately no, but you can use https://www.etymonline.com/ to check if a word is Latin/Greek origin.

[–] FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 2 points 2 days ago

Also, strong open source LLM might even be able to give you a skeleton to work from with the right prompting.

(Though you should double check words, LLM’s aren’t error proof).

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Reminds me of Salvatore in Name of the Rose.