Dear Alex (and anyone else who's interested),
If you have a PC, I think it
would be well worth your while getting acquainted with Mark Rosenfelder's
'sound change applier' at
http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm . The -p
modifier is useful for debugging your sound changes. If you've got a
compiler, it's well worth increasing the number of rules; a limit of 200 is
too low for serious work. I've put together Miguel's rules (and a few
others) in the attached file romanian.sc and some specimen Latin words in
latin.lex. Note that vowel length needs to be marked with a colon.
It took quite a while to sort out the ordering of the rules, and I'm still
not happy that I get $epte, not $apte, from septem 'seven'. I've cheated
with a couple of the Latin words - 'dre:ctus' and 'dre:cta', not 'di:rectus'
and 'di:re:cta', and 'virdia', not 'viridia'. The latter is interesting; I
don't remember anyone commenting that when 'viridis syncopated to *'virdis,
the neuter plural changed from vi'ridia to *'virdia.
Richard.
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