Re: 'Arabiiya

Just saying I agree that the tri-consonant root system
is different.  I have studied a bit of ancient Hebrew
and it looks very similar to your arabic.  Here are
some examples from Hebrew that further exemplefy what
you said here.

melek - king
malak - to reign
malkah - queen
malkuh - kingdom

However, this doesn't hold true for everthing.

Heather
--- David Peterson <DigitalScream@...> wrote:
>     So, in my Pidgins and Creoles class (taught by
> John McWhorter whom we all
> call the rock star of the linguistics
> department--he's the one that set me up
> on that swell research study that starts this
> Wednesday [and if there's
> anyone in the Bay Area that has nothing to do
> Thusday from 8-9 p.m., I'd
> welcome more volunteers! ~:D]), there's a girl who's
> doing her semester
> project on Noubi Arabic, and she knows absolutely NO
> Arabic (her response:
> "Well, I was going to take Arabic next
> semester..."), so I said I'd lend her
> my dictionary and textbook--both of which are VERY
> heavy.  And so she wasn't
> in class today!  I was so pissed off...  Now I have
> to bring them back
> Wednesday.  [Conlang relevance coming, I promise.]
> So, in my year of Arabic,
> we didn't completely finish the book (four or five
> chapters of 20+ at the end
> we left), so in between classes, I started on the
> chapter where we'd left off
> for funsies.  It happened to be the chapter
> outlining in detail the awzaan,
> or verb/noun paradigms.  It got me to thinking
> (because I didn't do this for
> my tri-consonantal language) that it'd be cool to do
> something like that, and
> outlined about 16 such paradigms with the word "to
> write" rendering "to
> dictate", "to record", "to author", "to write
> poetry" (from the paradigm
> whose meanings are "performing x action with no
> purpose or direction"), "to
> ignore", etc.  Anyway, if I ever do anything with
> this in a language, I'll
> post that; this was just an idea.
>     But, now I have a question which really has been
> teasing me for awhile
> but which I never voiced.  What's the deal with
> Arabic and Hebrew and all
> Semitic languages?  If we are to assume that Arabic
> did NOT descend into
> humanity via Allah talking to Muhammad (and that,
> consequently, Hebrew and
> Aramaic and all somehow arose from this), then how
> did the triconsonantal
> system come about?  It seems so artificial and
> unnatural to me that people
> naturally speaking language would sort of naturally
> decide that (a) it was
> the consonants that were important as to specific
> semantic categories, and
> (b) vowels moved in and around them in ways that
> unite semantic
> specifications with syntactic and schematic/thematic
> patterns.  It seems like
> it's a constructed language.  I mean, let's take
> w-l-d, for example.
>
> walad=child
> waalid=father
> waalida=mother
> awlaad=children
> walada=to give birth (I believe.  The verb is
> correct, but the form may be
> something else...)
>
>     Now, anyone can see how these semantic ideas are
> interrelated.  But in
> any natural language are any of these all derived
> from the same word?  For
> myself, I'm going to list some examples I know (you
> can ignore):
>
> English: as above.
>
> Spanish:
> niño
> padre
> madre
> niños
> nacer
> dar a luz (lit. "give to light".  Isn't that
> pretty?)
>
> German:
> Kind
> Vater
> Mutter
> Kinder
> gebären
>
> Russian (oh, and for native speakers, on any: you
> can correct me if there's a
> better word for any):
> rebyonok
> otyets
> matH (my interpretation of the soft sign after [t])
> rebyonoki
> roditH
>
> [Note: I notice there's an unrelated word for
> "childhood", "dyetstvo", just
> as there is in Arabic, "Tafuulati" (in this case,
> "T" means pharyngealized
> [t] not [T])]
>
> Latin:
> filivs/infans [childhood=infantiæ]
> pater
> mater
> filii/liberi
> partvrire/parere (not sure of this one)
>
> French:
> enfant
> père
> mère
> enfants
> accoucher de
>
> Hindi:
> bal/balak
> pita(ji)
> mata(ji)
> (bal-)bacce (also means "family")
> ???  (Too complex for David!)
>
>     I would venture a guess at other languages I'm
> familiar with, like
> Hawaiian, but I don't want to do it wrong, so I
> won't.  But anyway, the
> pattern with non-Arabic languages (and I haven't
> looked at Hebrew or Aramaic,
> but I'd imagine they're like Arabic) seems to be
> that mother and father look
> similar, though, obviously have different consonant
> make-up.  Children is
> just the plural, and actually, looking at it, I
> probably shouldn't have
> included the Arabic, since awlaad is simply the
> regular plural of walad.  I
> was thinking that because "walad" also means
> "boy"...  And "to give birth" is
> really different, not resembling any of the others
> (except maybe Latin...?
> With "pater"?).  And, unwittingly, all my languages
> follow this pattern.  I
> remember in specific reference to "mother/father", I
> objected strongly to
> "patrino" being the word for "mother" in Esperanto
> when I was learning it,
> and invented the word "matro", and yet it didn't
> even phase me that you got
> "mother" from the word for "father" by adding the
> feminine ending "-a" in
> Arabic.  (There is a term "umi" which is like "mom",
> though.)
>     So, my big question is: What's the deal?  Has
> anyone done a lot study on
> Semitic languages?  How did ordinary human beings
> naturally develop this
> system and, what's more, preserve it?  It absolutely
> mystifies me.
>
> -Dawuud

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