Re: Becoming triconsonantal, was: 'Arabiiya

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001 08:31:56 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>En réponse à Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>:
>
>[snip long but enlightening explanations]
>
>You've given me a beautiful tool for my Arabo-Romance conlang Vasiliy!
I'm happy to hear that. Keep me informed :)

>Though I
>don't want to go as far as a triconsonnantal root system (I want an Arabo-
>Romance lang, not a Roman-Arabic one :)) ), it's very interesting for me to
>develop the right sound changes that will transform the Latin syllable
>structure into a Arabic-like one.
As for the syllable structure, it's easy: CV(C) :)

But do you plan for any Arabic-like alternations? I sort of can't imagine
an agglutinative version of Arabic :)

>Now if I could only find a good resource on
>Vulgar Latin on the web (or at least a good resource on Classical Latin
>including the length marks - I really need them -.
Same problem with me. I even started to type a Latin wordlist myself
(mainly root words and some less predictable derivates), and I reached
somewhere around the middle of 'F', but then something more urgent
emerged... :(

It would be really helpful to have an electronic wordlist with lengths,
even without translations.

>Descending a Romance lang
>from Classical Latin may seem artificial,
No, I don't think so. It only means that your lang got split before
some common (West-) Romance innovations.

>but then look at Sardinian, where a
>lot of words come from Classical Latin, not from Vulgar Latin (like I think
>iskire - or something like that - for "to know", from CL "scire" instead of
>VL "sapere")).
Yes, Sardinian is a good example here.

>And of course, somebody who could explain me what the stress
>patterns are in Arabic
It's easy: exactly like in Latin (but tanwins and other short-vowel endings
are deleted *after* applying the rule; OTOH, no reservations associated
with syllable boundaries, since a syllable can begin only with one
consonant; article, prepositions etc. are kept apart, except in pronominal
forms).

>(take Modern Classical Arabic, not dialects, so that I
>can consider that it's not far from the stress pattern of Arabic in the
>time of
>Mahomet or before).
Hm... this is a bit more difficult. I tried to read some pre-Islamic
rhymed poetry, and my impression was that accentuation rules may have
differed. But what's the problem? Anyway, the accent was non-phonological,
entirely depending on segments.


Basilius

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