Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: markjjones@HOTMAIL.COM)

--- Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:
> Sorry, what's the difference between laminal and
> apical?
I believe apicals are pronounced with the tip of the
tongue, while laminals are pronounced with the broad
surface of the tongue. English and German both have
apical [s] and [z]; I believe some dialects of Spanish
have a laminal [s], which gives the silibants a
'lispy' feel. Basque, IIRC, tells between both laminal
and apical [s] as phonemes.

'Retroflex' can be an extreme case of apicality, by
the way. In one conlang sketch, I had an apical velar
fricative; a 'retroflex' [x], with the tip of the
tongue approaching the velum (I have a very flexible
tongue). Can't think of any natlangs with that
phoneme.

> If there was */ts/, */dz/, and */s/, then we could
> say that */K/ became /S/ in Arabic (rather than
> merging with /S/).
For my current conlang, I tried to get away with using
/shiyn/ for [K], since IIRC, it was possibly
[K]anyways at one point. Didn't 'look' right, so I
decided to use /saad/ (using the logic that /saad/ is
a mere variant of /siyn/, which is an easy and typical
step to make, since I don't expect the speakers of my
language to be expert phonologists).

> However, the South Arabian languages have both /K/
> and /S/.  Perhaps */s/ > /S/, */ts/ > /s/, and
> */dz/ > /z/ there.  But what would cause /s/ to
> become /S/?
Palatalization? But in a root language like the
Semitics, it would mean that [s] and [S] would
alternate; it would stand to reason that other
consonants would fall under the influence of
palatalization as well; i.e., [z] becoming [Z] or [dZ]
and so on.

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse when I say that
laminal [s] can easily become postalveolar [S]; that's
what happened in German, at least.

> I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I wonder if
> the traditional interpretation of written Akkadian
> is a little incorrect.  Not only does Akkadian show
> |š| in the S-stems, where Arabic shows ?- and
> Hebrew h-, but it also has |š| in the personal
> pronouns: šu: 'he', ši: 'she' (cf. Arabic
> huwa 'he', hiya 'she').  So the question is, did
> Akkadian retain an earlier /S/ where Arabic and
> Hebrew did not?
Good question. I'm going to have to look into that;
like I don't have enough to think about already.
Today, at work, I was trying to figure out what an
object with negative mass would be like. I lead a very
rich inner life :).

The alternation between [h] in Hebrew and [s/S] in
Akkadian makes some sense ([s] leniting to [h] is
pretty common in languages, IIRC), but how does Arabic
get away with [?]?

Then again, it could be that Arabic dropped [h] under
certain circumstances (in most dialects, it's a voiced
glottal approximant, and therefore, very weak indeed)
and replaced it with [?], since words in Arabic cannot
begin with an empty onset.

I heard it posited that the definite article /al-/ was
/*hal-/ at some point in both Hebrew and Arabic, and
the two langauges just dropped a different phomene in
each of their respective cases. Makes some sense, at least...


	

	
		
___________________________________________________________
Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 250MB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de

Reply