Re: CHAT: liaison (was: Re: CHAT: Synesthesia and conlanging (was Re: The ConlangInstinct))

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999 09:39:15 +0000 Paul Bennett <Paul.Bennett@...>
writes:
> What about Arabic doing all those wonderful things to <al->?
>
> ISTR the <a> assimilates to the preceding vowel (if present), and
> the <l>
> assimilates to the following consonant for certain consonants (ISTR
> it was all
> the ones romanised with capitals, but that's prolly way off).  Isn't
> the
> <a>-assimilation a kind of liaison?  Depending on your opinion of
> the
> "boundedness" of <al->, the <l> assimilation might be as well?
.

If i remember the 3 lessons in the _Teach Yourself Arabic_ book i
attempted that i completed, i don't think the _a_ in _al-_ elides,
because it begins with a hamza, /?/....only words that really begin with
vowels get elided.  The _l_ gets lost in a gemination of following
letters called "sun (_shams_?) letters", because one of them is
/S/....it's not just the emphatics, and i think that the voiceless
pharyngeal fricative which is commonly romanized {H} doesn't assimilate
the L.  It probably has to do with alveolar consonants.  Just for
comparison, the Hebrew cognate _ha-_ has no L, but it does geminate every
following consonant, so it might have originally been cognates of /hal/ ~
/?al/, differing in fricative vs. stop.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Eze-guvdhab wa'hrikh-a tze, / "zhoutzii wa'esh," i eze-mwe."
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