Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

Hi Christophe,


As I've been toying with Arabic for a few months, perhaps I have a few
observations I can share with you. I treat some details in a way which
is very far from commonly accepted, but I won't bother about commenting
and substantiating right now, OK?

On Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:52:36 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:


> the history of Arabic. Where does it come from? What
>did it look like 2000 years ago? Is it plausible to have Roman settling in
an
>Arabic-speaking place of 2000 years ago?
Arabs are mentioned in Latin and Greek sources; they inhabited Arabia
in the modern sense (or at least northern part of it) and some adjacent
lands (including Nabatea). They contacted the speakers of Aramaic, South
Arabian languages (ancestral to today's Sokotran, etc.), and possibly
Middle Persian.

Their language was very archaic (as is modern literary Arabic, compared
to all other Semitic langs except Akkadian). Structurally, the Arabic
of 1st century could be not too different from Proto-West-Semitic.

Main problem with merging it with a Romance dialect: it had 3-way
opposition for occlusives, voiced : weak (aspirated) voiceless :
emphatic (glottalized) voiceless. Correspondences with today's Arabic
for the glottalized series (the other two haven't changed too much):

t'  >  [t.] ('emphatic' t)
t_l' (or maybe s_l') > [d.] ('emphatic' d)
c' (or already s') > [s.] ('emphatic' s)
k' > [q] (the uvular/back velar stop, _qaf_; in the times you are
interested in hardly different from k and g in the place of articulation)

Modern interdentals (T, D) were affricates (exact quality unclear).
The glottalized affricate of the same row (different from the s'/c' >
[s.] mentioned above) turned into modern [z.] ('emphatic' z).

And indeed, modern [d_Z] was [g] (preserved in some modern dialects).

Modern [f] could be still [p] (doubtful). Modern [S] was a lateral
s_l, or maybe t_l and s_l were still different but later merged
in s_l > [S]. (Note the nearly complete lateral series - may be
a good thing for the Arabo-Romance, a way to reinterprete the clusters
with _l_).

This is nearly all about the consonants. It only has to be added that
modern words with 'waslated' alif could still begin with a cluster
([bnun] 'son', [t_Sna:ni] 'two', etc.). Nasals, liquids, [b], uvular
fricatives and all post-uvulars remained. See below about glides.

Vowels. Originally, the inventory was probably same as today: 3 short
+ 3 long + 2 diphthongs. However, it is not clear which stage of the
following development was actual for the time you ask about:

(1) Unchanged.
(2) With (some of) the contractions and other changes described in
Arabic grammars for 'weak' roots - the difference from the modern
state being that (no less than) two additional long vowels were still
distinct from the original long ones: [O:] < awa and [E:] < aja.

I'm inclined to think that around the beginning of Christian era it
was still (1).

Most probably, the apocopated pausal forms still had not developed
(e. g. the main feminine ending was still [-atu] even sentence-finally).

Now, special problems with Arabo-Romance:

1) Where to get uvular fricatives and the distinction 'laryngeal vs.
pharyngeal';

2) Where to get the distinction 'weak (aspirated) voiceless vs.
emphatic (glottalized) voiceless'?

For the second problem:

It may be interesting to consider borrowings from Greek into Aramaic
and Ethiopic which had a similar distinction. Typically, they borrow
Greek aspirates as weak, and (!) Greek plain voiceless as glottalized
(rarely, as voiced). This is also true for borrowings from Greek to
Aramaic to (pre-written) Arabic. So, if you first invent an early
Romance dialect with aspirates... (?)

(I'd think of something along the following lines: initial C > Ch,
but sC > C > C'... or something like that).

As for 'velar vs. uvular' and 'laryngeal vs. pharyngeal' - perhaps,
an influence of some vowel qualities (otherwise being lost)?

I hope this will help a bit. Good luck!


Basilius