Folkspræk

This is an attempt at a 'version' of the language Folkspraak which retains proto-Germanic (and the original orthographic convenions when the word does not originate from Germanic) graphemes in order to act as a 'neutral' orthography which is unaffected by decisions and preferences regarding final orthographic and phonetic form. It is not intended for especially easy learning or to be the final 'version' of the language (as the aim of the language is an easily learnable auxiliary language), but rather a way of making progress on areas such as word basic form and usage and of using the language whilst sidestepping 'decisions' such as eventual orthography.

Basics

The orthography with reagrds 'native' words is basically a fairly standard proto-Germanic based one, whilst loan words retain their original spelling to a great extent. Suffixes and prefixes are as archaic as possible, e.g. <for-> not <fer->. In order that text written in the language may be rapidly translated into other 'versions' of Folkspraak, prefixes and suffixes can be marked with a <~>, <|>, or such between them and the stem, thus allowing them to be replaced by find-and-replace routine independently. The Greek alphabet, Cyrillic, or, less preferably, capital Roman letters, can be employed to distiguish 'loan' sounds from native ones. Thus loan /b/ can be written <β> in order that it not be shifted to <v> or such in other orthographies (which may, in this case, shift proto-Germanic medial and final /b/ to <v>). This feature may become obsolete rapidly for consonants at least as consensus on consonant form in generally better than with regard vowels.