Re: Arabic article (was: Corpses)
| From: | Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, November 13, 2003, 15:33 |
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At 14:20 13.11.2003, John Cowan wrote:
>Which leads us to the 64-peseta question: why were the Spanish so
>utterly unable to recognize the Arabic article as such, despite its
>strong semantic and even phonological resemblance to their own article?
>The surrounding Romance languages all have clitic articles, and have
>contributed a great deal of vocabulary to Spanish, but there has never
>been any question of borrowing words from them with the article still
>attached.
Probably because most spaniards didn't learn
Arabic at all, but a Berber-Arabic pidgin
used by the Berber soldiery(sp?) and probably
also by the Arabic-speaking lords when speaking
to such low-lifes as Berber soldiers or
christian peasants/workers.
Indeed I find it equally odd that speakers
of French creoles haven't found out that
the la-/li-/l- at the beginning of most
of their nouns is actually redundant, unless
they feel it as a part-of-speech marker.
/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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