Re: Dental Fricatives

From: "Keith" <kam@...>

| 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/!

They might've been used interchangeably, or Proto-Semitic <s'.>
(emphatic voiceless lateral fricative) became /?\/ in one form of
Aramaic and /q/ in another. I'd have to read into that. I got some .pdf
files on Semitic orthography and phonetics I need to study.

| 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).

Sergei Starosin has something like this for an inventory for P-Semitic:

b p p' d t t' dz ts ts' s dZ tS tS' S tl tl' g k k' gw kw k'w X R H 3 h
? m n r l w y / a i u a: i: u:

Which isn't much different than Bomhard's Nostratic inventory, or
(ObConlang) Old Tech.

The status of uvular fricatives: they were probably once stops: [q] [G\]
that became fricatives.

| 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./
???

Arabic /d~/ came from Proto-Semitic /tl'/, the emphatic voiceless
lateral affricate.
Arabic /D~/ came from Proto-Semitic /tS'/ via [T~].
Also: Arabic /T/ and /D/ came from P-Sem /tS/ and /dZ/, which merged
with /S/ and /z/ in Hebrew and /t/ and /d/ in Aramaic.

| BTW the following looks like being very useful as it develops :
|
| http://mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu/~gragg/aai/AAI.html

FINALLY!! It was offline for months but now it's running again. I hope
it's been updated/corrected.

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