Re: New to the List, too

Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:
>One such element is de, which is found in Aramaic. D (in Old Aramaic, Z)
>is derived from Proto-Semitic *ðv-, which appears as the demonstrative
>pronoun in several languages (Hebrew zeh, zu; Phoenician Z, etc). In
"That means 'edh-vowel' right?

Correct - in Semitic we have about five or six different ways of representing that
consonant, so I stuck to the one with which the list would be most familiar.

"I have a question -- I was studying Proto-Semitic (and tried to find
Proto-Afroasiatic data). In South Arabian (not Arabic) languages, the 'emphatic
d' corresponds to a consonant transliterated as z' (z-acute). Since s-acute,
found in Old Hebrew, is supposedly a voiceless lateral fricative, the z-acute
is probably the voiced lateral fricative."
 Please, pretty please, pay no attention to the diacritics we benighted
Semitists use. Especially in Old South Arabian (also known as Sayhadic, or
Epigraphic South Arabian). The fellows who came up with the transliteration
system for Old South Arabian were thinking of Arabic and Hebrew, and gave
Arabic and Hebrew values to the OSA repertoire of consonants even though they
were probably quite different. In fact, it was only recently that OSA was
admitted to the Central Semitic family of languages (due to its uniquely
Central Semitic way of forming the preterite) but that doesn't forgive those
early researchers who assumed that it sounded just like Arabic.

 So, here's the quick and dirty. OSA preserves the entire inventory of sounds
from Proto-Semitic. As you might imagine, this makes it fairly easy to spot
correspondences between OSA and other Semitic languages. Nevertheless, these
correspondences are complicated by the fact that we (for traditional reasons)
transliterate s3 (s with accent acute) the sound represented by PS *ts' (an
ejective affricate, which became tzaddi in Hebrew). The sound that became sin
(s with accent acute) in Hebrew is represented by s2, which, to complicate
things, is transliterated using shin (s with hacek). This is the sound that
descends from the PS voiceless lateral fricative in Hebrew and OSA.

 I apologize for any confusion my colleagues may have caused. There's a good
reason Linguistic Departments in the US routinely hang signs in their windows
stating "No Semitists Need Apply." We need to get our stuff in order.

 Well, now, emphatic d in OSA descends from the the "emphatic voiceless lateral
fricative" in Proto Semitic (the vogue these days is to reconstruct these
emphatic sounds as ejectives). It appears in OSA as an emphatic d because
(wouldn't you know it) that is the reflex in Arabic of this PS sound. The
reflex of this sound in Hebrew merged with tzaddi (along with PS *ts' and *th')

 As for z-acute, well, I'm not familiar with that one. In OSA there are two z's
- a regular z (descended from PS *dz) and an "emphatic" z (with a dot under it,
descended from PS *th', an ejective fricative). The reason the reflex of PS
*th' is represented that way is because it is cognate to Arabic DHal, and in
some dialects of Arabic is pronounced like an emphatic /z/. So naturally, we
would use this sound to represent the cognate in OSA (doesn't that make sense
to you?).

 Or perhaps you were asking about *Modern* South Arabian languages (which are
given the confusing acronym MSA, and are not related to the Old South Arabian
languages)? They, too, preserve most of PS's consonant repertoire, but I'm not
familiar with the z-acute. The s-accute corresponds to s2 in OSA and sin in
Hebrew, unless it has a dot under it, in which case it corresponds to Hebrew
tzaddi and Arabic "emphatic d." I prefer to call these languages Mahrian so
that you wouldn't confuse them with Epigraphic South Arabian or Modern Standard
Arabic.


"According to the pro-Nostratic cadre, this consonant was originally a
lateral affricate, /dl/ (or a laterally-released /d/). S-acute is linked to
a voiceless counterpart: /tL/ or /L/ (where L is IPA l-curl, the voiceless
lateral fricative).

Is there other evidence of this?"

 We generally reconstruct the PS origin of Arabic and OSA emphatic d as an
ejective lateral fricative (see above). In fact, early Arab grammarians
described this sound as having an l-like quality to it (this is seen, for
instance, in the Spanish spelling of some Arabic words, such as alcalde for
al-qaDi). So, the short of it is that few believe that an emphatic d existed in
Proto-Semitic. It sounds, however, that the Nostraticists need to delve into
the arcane sigils we use, in order to better understand our work; it's just one
way of separating us from them (well, that, and the fact that every Semitic
language, and every Semitic linguist, uses a different transliteration system -
three are in vogue at Harvard right now for Hebrew, and I need to know all of
them).
-Chollie



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