Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 01:17:12PM -0500, Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
> In Semitic langs themselves, pharyngeals are often a result of wealening
> the uvulars (in fact, all well attested languages except Arabic had lost
> their uvulars this way).
Pharyngeals are *weakened* uvulars? The world is a very strange place,
seeing as how I can produce uvulars just fine but pharyngeals give me
trouble...

> >> (no less than) two additional long vowels were still
> >> distinct from the original long ones: [O:] < awa and [E:] < aja.
> >
> >Are those phonemic in modern Arabic? I thought that *awa and *aya both
> ended
> >up simply as /a:/.
>
> Correct - for open syllables; in closed ones they get shortened and
> narrowed to [i], [u] (cf. the paradigm of 'empty' verbs like k(w)n 'to be').
Ok, but the gist of my question was whether [O:] and [E:] from *awa and *aja
are still separate in Arabic. I was under the impression that although there
are allophones such as those from /a:/, they're conditioned by factors other
than morphology.

> >Lateral release? Where did that come from, a local dialect of Arabic?
> >(Proto-Semitic supposedly had tl' and hl which correspond to Arabic
> emphatic
> >d and Hebrew sin.)
>
> Spanish words like alcalde < al-kad.ij- seem to evidence the lateral
> quality of [d.] in the Andalusian dialect (which appears very archaic
> in some other respects, too - cf. the treatment of the article before
> 'solar' consonants in Gibr-al-tar, Al-taire, etc.).
So these were stops with lateral release, not lateral affricates?

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo