Re: Dental Fricatives

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote

> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 13:30:58 -0600 Danny Wier <dawier@...> writes:
>> Also, if you compare certain Semitic languages:
>> Arabic /T/ = Hebrew /S/ = Aramaic /t/
>> Arabic /D/ = Hebrew /z/ = Aramaic /d/
>> Arabic /D~/ = Hebrew /s~/ = Aramaic /t~/ (emphatics)
> -
> And sometimes you get Arabic /d~/ = Hebrew /s~/ = Aramaic /3/
> as in |arD| = |eretz| = |ar`a|
Take a look at Jeremiah X.11
"Thus ye shall say to them 'The gods which (are) of the heavens and the
earth they shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens (even)
they'"

The bit in the inner quotes is in Aramaic and "earth" is written once
with /3/ and once with /q/!

I'm still trying to figure out semitic phonological evolution so that I
know how to derive words in Saprutum (though I can always fall back on
"dialect mixture" when I get it wrong). I think if we could figure out
the above correspondence we'd be a lot nearer to understanding what
happened. My guess is that there were a few more phonemes (or incipient
phonemes) in proto-semitic than the "official" 29. Given that they had
so few vowels, a large phoneme inventory isn't too unexpected.
F'rinstance, what about two 'ayin's, a stop /G\/ and a fricative /3/.
Then matching velar /k, x, g, G/ there'd be uvular/pharingeal /q, H, G\,
3/ which make a nice orthogonal set. All you need is an original /k, g/
subject to plus or minus lenition, and plus or minus "emphasis"
(retracted articulation).
If you then do something similar with the dentals, starting with voiced
and voiceless, apical and laminal stops ... I'd better save this for
another post in a day or two when I've done some checking, but don't you
think it odd that Arabic has a couple of _voiced_ emphatics /d., D./ ???

BTW the following looks like being very useful as it develops :

http://mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu/~gragg/aai/AAI.html

Keith Mylchreest

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