Re: qis iscijat a linuva "afer?"

Padraic iscrisit:
"On the contrary! Some of us are waiting for you tell us more about
it; and can't wait to hear what some of your sources are. I.e.,
especially for African Latin."

    Thanks!  I've been tinkering with this idea for quite a while, and it
feels good to get it out of my head and onto paper.
    The bedrock on which I've constructed Afer is Classical Latin, although
I am filtering it through Joszef Herman's excellent book on Vulgar Latin.
Unfortunately, until I learn more about Vulgar Latin, I need to base the
vocabulary upon "reflexes" of Classical Latin and the (modern) Romance
languages that I know.
    I've been using a program to run a group of sound changes through a
Latin lexicon (the 8000 words that I mentioned).  I've been tinkering with
some rules for a while now and I think I have a nice core group upon which
to build.
    The first thirty or so rules reflect the colloquial form of the Latin
language which the (Libyan- and Punic- speaking) North Africans would have
picked up and modified for their own uses; many of these rules are taken
from Herman's book.  I also threw in a couple of vague "areal rules" based
upon changes that other languages (Romance and Semitic) have undergone in
the area (simplification of diphthongs, elimination of some phonemes, etc.).
  Some of the holes left by the conspicuous absence of any North African
romance language are filled by Sardu, which I have (with a little
justification) assumed to be the next best thing.
    The next cluster of rules come from observations of North African texts.
  I consulted Joyce Reynold's "Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania" and
attempted to draw conclusions from those inscriptions before I read about
Rebuffat and Marichal's publication of the ostraca from Bu Njem in Algeria.
J.N. Adams wrote an excellent article on "Latin and Punic in Contact?  The
Case of the Bu Njem Ostraca;" this was in The Journal of Roman Studies, vol.
84 (1994).  While I don't necessarily agree with all of Adams' hypotheses on
Punic influences on the Latin used at Gholaia, he does conveniently
enumerate all of ways the Latin diverges from the stardard variety and
separates those aspects which can not be explained by other (known)
substandard varieties of Latin.
    The finishing touches are primarily orthographic; I wanted to make it
look something like a cross between Maltese and Sardu.

thuc Cathy iscrisit:
"Would this Latin-African mixture be similar to mozárabe, a mixture of
Spanish and Arabic that existed in southern Spain due to the influence of
the Moors who lived there from approx. 800-1498?"
    It is similar to Mozarabic, in that it is a substandard dialect of Latin
which has been "adjusted" to a Semitic (well, Afro-Asiatic to be precise)
substrate.  I've seen some Mozarabic texts and they share a few aspects with
Afer.
    The Mozarabic that I have seen was loaded with Arabic words.. I haven't
introduced an Arabic influence to Afer (in this parallel universe, did the
Arabs even conquer North Africa? I don't know yet.) but if I do, I will
probably cull the words from sources like Spanish, Mozarabic, and Maltese
rather than taking them straight from Classical Arabic.
-Chollie

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