Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean

On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 20:58:57 -0500 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
writes:
>Steg Belsky wrote:
>> "manus" (mani, manorum)
>> mani >> MAN
>> manorum >> manorm (accented on the second syllable, R = velar
>retroflex
>> approximant) >> MANO:M
>You might want to watch out here:  the final <-m> in <manorum>
>and <manum>, etc., was quite likely simply the orthographic indicator
>for nasalization on the preceding vowel, IIRC.  So, you might actually
>get [mano:~] there.   Ray, you're our local classicist; do you have a
>comment on this? :)
Well, i don't like nazalized vowels, and it's my conlang, so there :-P
;-)
Back to Real Rationalization :) , i'd explain this because the Judeans
weren't native speakers of Latin, so the Latin that Judean evolved from
was placed over a Semitic (and maybe Greek?) substrate (i think that's
the word), where there are no nasalized vowels.  So just like i often use
an English R when speaking Spanish, they might hypercorrect and pronounce
the M instead of nasalizing the vowel.

>> "puella" (puellae, puellarum)
>> puellae >> /pwElaj/ >> pwela >> pfela >> PELA
>> puellarum >> /pwEl'aRm/ >> pfela:m >> PELA:M
>Ditto from the above -- [pEla:~].  Also, how do you reason the
>change from [w] to [f]?  I realize they're both labial, but why would
>it devoice like that?  For most cases of [pf] I've seen, if they
>change,
>turn into fricatives, not stops.
In Judean, all /w/s turned into either [v] or [f], depending on the
environment.  They're still written with a {w}, where they exist, though.
 It's a rule called [SaZaS], written "sayas" with upside-down ^s over the
Ss.  It's given that name because an example of it is the letter S -
"^saya^s" is the 'specification spelling' of how _sasas_ is pronounced,
[SaZaS].  The rule is that when a {s} or {w} are surrounded by voiced
sounds, they're voiced ([Z] and [v]), and when they're not fully
surrouned, they're not voiced ([S] and [f]).  Devoiced vowels, like the
{o`} in _ponso`_, dont' count.

So, the word [pwEla] turned into [pfEla], because the [w] >> [f].
And then the /f/ dropped, because when a stop and an affricate which have
close points of articulation are next to eachother, i decided the stop
wins, because it's a "stronger" sound.

>Also, the normal change was [ai] --> [e:], IIRC... not that yours must
>have that or anything. :)
>
>=======================================================
>Tom Wier <artabanos@...>

-Stephen (Steg)
 "God punishes - humans take revenge."

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