Re: From The Ashes...

>From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
>Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 15:55:04 +0100
>
>Funny the fascination we seem to have with the Arabic script. There's still
>that project of mine of an Arabo-Romance conlang, which began as a wish to
>write a Romance language with the Arabic alphabet :)) .
>
While I think the Arabic script is one of THE loveliest scripts, I have
never made any attempt to learn it.  It's intimidating.  Way too complex.
Give me something simple like Chinese chaozi(sp?). LOL  I probably *should*
be taking a look at that beautibeast (why isn't there a word for that) since
it may have been used, at some point, to write Carthaginian.

Yes, I'm still working on Carthaginian.  (I've given up on calling it by
it's "native" name since I'm no longer sure what the native form of Cathage
will be.)  I've been bust collecting Arabic loans in Spanish (and other
Romance langs), Germanic loans in French and the Iberian langs, words for
"head" in all the Romancelangs, etc.  Of course, I still haven't found any
really good info on any of those topics.

I *did* find one list of 1600 Arabic words in Spanish.  Unfortunately, it
gives no English glosses, no etymologies, no dates of entry to Spanish
(though some are clearly modern borrowings like babismo) and the on-line
Spanish-English dicts I've checked don't have the VAST majority of the words
in the list.  I'd still LOVE to find some *real* info.

For right now, I'm considering sound changes, meaning shifts and borrowings
(from Gothic [standing in for Vandal], Punic/Phonecian [with Ugaritic,
Biblical Hebrew, et al filling in gaps] and various Berber langs [standing
in for Numidian]) for Stage I, North African Vulgar Latin.

Once I have that worked out I'll go on to Stage II, Proto-Carthaginian.
Stage II will invlove more Germanic borrowings and an influx of Greek (and
possibly Coptic) vocab and further sound changes.

Stage III, Early Cartaginian, will see massive borrowing from Arabic and
major sound changes.

Stage IV, Old C, will see French, Occitan, Sicilian, Genoese, Pisan, Catalan
and Spanish influence. And of course sound changes.

Stage V, Middle C will see something (borrowings from Latin? Greek?) or
other and maybe a GVS!

Stage VI, Modern C will see more borrowning from French, English and other
"major" European langs.  Perhaps a conscious attempt to calque some of the
new and previous borrowings to "purify" the language, learned borrowings
from Latin and Greek.  And maybe a sound change for variety's sake. *g*

Adam who's always looking for something a bit of the beaten track

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