Re: Dental Fricatives

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 01:09:07 +0000 Keith <kam@...> writes:
> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote
> > 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/!
-

Actually, the intro (|kidna teimerun lehom|) is also Aramaic.  That's SO
WEIRD!! :-P  What the heck is that Aramaic doing there??? :-S  (=confused
smiley)  Maybe (like what you were saying) the |q/3| was pronounced as a
voiced stop, and Yirmiyahu (or Barukh?  or whoever) alternated because he
couldn't figure out the closest way to represent it.

> 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./
> ???
-

I love those!  It makes the emphatic system all nice and symmetrical ;-)

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

Wow, that looks pretty cool!  Or at least i hope it will be... right now
it's just being a little aggravating.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "no sig for you!"