Re: New to the List, too

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 11:57:01 -0700 Vima Kadphises
<vima_kadphises@...> writes:
>     Allow myself to introduce ... myself to the list.
> My name is Chollie Häberl and I'm a 23 year old
> amateur linguist and less amateur philologist.
> Currently I'm working towards a degree in Semitic
> languages, both alive and dead, with a primary focus
> on Aramaic and the larger NorthWest Semitic Language
> family.
-

Cool!  Welcome to the list!  I'm an undergraduate majoring in Judaic
Studies and minoring in Linguistics, so our interests seem to coincide at
more than just conlanging!  I recently read an article by Cornell's
professor Rendsburg about Ancient Hebrew phonology, it was the first
substantial thing i've read about it....it amazed me that most of the
"abnormally large vowel inventory of Hebrew" are really just allophones
of the basic Semitic vowel system.

One of my conlanging side-projects is a Judean Romance Language, right
now named _Jûdajca_ [juwzajka], a hypothetical language spoken in an
alternate timeline where the Romans flooded Judea with imperial colonists
in order to control it, but the colonists ended up assimilating into the
Judean population and their language became the vernacular, developing
such Hebraic features such as bege"d-kefe"t (like the softened <d> [z] in
the language's name) and emphatic consonants.  Other people on Conlang
have created similar Romancelangs in Iranian and British-Celtic
frameworks.

>     Other conlanging interests of mine include a
> version of Hebrew called "Ameriqit," based on the
> grammar of Puritan texts composed in Hebrew and the
> persistent legend that Ben Franklin called for Hebrew
> to be adopted as the language of the new Republic.  A
> fellow named Judah Monis, who wrote the first American
> grammar of Hebrew back in 1735, created a quirky
> romanization system for Hebrew which I'm planning to
> adopt (The title of this book is "Dickdook leshon
> gnebreet" -- it has some interesting features, such as
> the use of "ng" for 'ayn.  Apparently this is
> characteristic of the pronunciation of Hebrew in vogue
> among Dutch Jews even to this day).  I'd like to carry
> this project out by sketching the development of
> American Hebrew to the current day, augmented the
> vocabulary with distinctly American words
> characteristic of American English (eg. those borrowed
> from Native American languages, for example) modified
> to fit Ameriqit phonology.
-

Wow, this is also cool!  :-)
The pronunciation of `ayin as /N/ also survives in the vernacularized
Yiddish form of _Ya`aqov_, pronounced /'jaNk@v/.
What does the romanization system look like?  I have a few of my own,
including "Judean style" (based on Judajca) and one influenced by that
one (i have a thing for using cedillas to mark _rafeh_ consonants) that i
use with Unicode fonts.

>
> -Chollie

-Stephen (Steg)
 "do not fear night-terror, nor the arrow that flies by day."