Re: New to the List, too

Chollie wrote:

>Oskar Gudlaugsson
>---------------------------------
>wrote:
>"I hoped then to exchange more information
>with you in order to get some ideas on Semitic elements in the IAL."
>
>I can make a good case for several "Semitic elements" that would be rather
>useful to any IAL.  As far as I know, Leo Moser has discussed several of
>them, but I think that they bear repeating, especially in the context of
>your World Pidgin project.
>
>One such element is de, which is found in Aramaic.  D (in Old Aramaic, Z)
>is derived from Proto-Semitic *æ­¬ which appears as the demonstrative
>pronoun in several languages (Hebrew zeh, zu; Phoenician Z, etc).  In
>Aramaic and some other NW Semitic languages, it becomes a relative pronoun,
>(*) OR it can indicate a relationship between the two items modified; e.g.
>Aram. bayta d'malka, "king's house" or "house of the king," OR malka
>d'nibhar "the king who will perish."
"De". Wonderful! We happen to have there a simple little word that has
similar forms with a similar meaning in three major language families,
Romance IE, Semitic, and North-Chinese. Thanks, now I'll definitely use this
word in the Global Slang.

>(*) Probably (IMO) on analogy with a genitive relationship (which we call
>the "construct relationship', aka iDaafa in Arabic): in a hypothetic NW
>Semitic sentence, baytu á °a'ala "this house he built," lit. "this house
>(of) he built" becomes reinterpreted as "the house which he built" and the
>relative pronoun is born.
>
>The beauty of de is that the concept is rather universal and the element
>itself means something similar to many different people.  Hence, it will
>look like Mandarin pidgin to a speaker of Chinese and Romance pidgin to a
>European.  I think that this fits well into your idea of a "worldwide
>slang."  Several Maghrebi Arabic dialects use a word, ta, with a similar
>meaning (this word appears in Maltese).
Exactly, as I said above. Genial :)

>Another great Semitic concept is the nisbe adjective.  Scads of nisbe forms
>have entered into English (e.g. Israeli); it appears in Arabic and Hebrew
>(though to a lesser extent), and similar forms appear in tons of languages,
>IE and Afro-Asiatic.  Kjell R. was just using forms in Slavic languages,
>Indo-Iranian languages, English, and Swedish to justify his including a
>similar form in Communicando.  In Arabic, the nisbe is used to derive an
>adjective from a noun.  Hence, an adjective "dog-like, doggy" could be
>derived from the noun kalb- "dog" by creating a nisbe form kalbi.  I
>believe that the nisbe transcends linguistic borders and creates the effect
>that you are looking for.
I don't understand properly how this is used. Is "nisbe" a word that is used
in speech, or is it a local linguistic term for a certain morphological
process (kalb- > kalbi)? Whichever, having -i as a suffix for that meaning
is already quite desirable, especially because of English ('shake' >
'shaky').

>There are, of course, lexical borrowings from Arabic in numerous languages,
>most significantly into Southern Romance, Eastern European, and anywhere
>where there are Islamic cultures to be found.
>-Chollie
Thanks a lot. Any specific terms which you'd define as "international". I
know of 'sugar' and 'algebra'.

Well, your post was useful for me, so I thank you once again. Hope you have
some more good ones :) :)

Oskar
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