Carlos Thompson <cthompso@...> wrote:
> vardi wrote:
>=20
> > Thanks John! Yeah, there is a root KH - W - L with the meaning grant=
,
> > accord, concede. That's almost certainly it! The mystery is solved.
> >=20
> > The middle root letter is "w", a "hollow" letter in Arabic grammatica=
l
> > terms, falling out in many conjugations. So the fact that only the KH
> > (in Spanish orthography - "j") and the L remain is quite
understandable.
[snip]
> > As for Gustavo's comment that the Portuguese equivalent uses a "sh" (=
S)
> > sound rather than KH, I guess we must now see that not as a more
> > faithful rendition of the original Arabic, but rather as the
> > assimilation of the expression into the (beautiful and gentle, IMHO)
> > sound patterns typical of Portuguese.
>=20
> The original pronunciation of <j> in Spanish was /Z/ which get devoiced
/S/
> and back /x/, probably "ojal=E1" is derived from a arab root using /Z/ =
or
> /S/... =BF/nS/? That could explain Portuguese "oxal=E1".
There are some questions we have to ask ourselves:
Did Spanish have /x/ at that time (together with /Z/ and /S/)? If that's
the case, an Arabic KH could have entered Spanish as /x/ and then adopted
by Portuguese as /S/.
Did Spanish still have original Latin /h/?
If it had lost it already, a possible Arabic /h/ could have been
heard as /x/.
And then of course, the original expression could have had /S/;
but I don't think /inS-/ could have developed into /ox-/.
--Pablo Flores
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Wyszkowski's Second Law:
Anything can be made to work
if you fiddle with it long enough.
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