Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

En réponse à Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>:

>
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:52:36 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
> <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> >The reason for those questions is that I'd love to see a Romance
> language
> >written in Arabic script (IMHO one of the most beautiful of the
> world,
> along
> >with the Tibetan script and the devanagari), but I'm wondering if
> it's
> possible.
>
> I'd agree about the beauties - if I hadn't seen samples from late
> (Syriac)
> Aramaic writings (Serto/a and Estrangelo/a)...
>
Well, I never saw them, so I stick to my preferences :) .

>
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 14:51:05 -0500, Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
> wrote:
>
> >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.
>
> I forgot to mention: Gr [st] > *s' > [s.] ('emphatic' s). This change
> may be of use, too.
>
Indeed... What about Greek /pt/ and /ps/? Did they stay like that or become
emphatic too?

> Another problem I can foresee: consonant clusters. As you know, Arabic
> allows them only intervocally (and sentence-finally) but seems to put
> no
> other restrictions onto them. So, just simplifying the Latin clusters
> won't suffice; some new ones seem to be necessary (through vowel
> reduction in certain positions?).
>
For initial consonnant clusters, I will use an epenthetic vowel [i] (common to
both Early Romance with sC clusters and Arabic with all initial clusters and
leading to "waslated" alifs). If they are three-consonnant clusters (I know only
two: scr and str) I will use other sound changes to simplify them (for instance
loss of [s] or clusters with r evolving into uvulars and pharyngeals).
Metathesis and vowel reduction in some unstressed positions will do the rest :)
. What is the stress pattern of Arabic by the way? Maybe compromizing between
both stress patterns would yield to nice effects, since it seems that sound
changes in Romance langs were a lot dependent on the position of the stress.

> OTOH, some types of clusters common in Latin seem to be rare in Arabic
> - especially 'nasal + homorganeous stop' (except dental). An
> alternative
> source for 'aspirated vs. plain ( > glottalized)'?
>
> (Besides, I'd love [Ng] as an additional source for [3], very frequent
> in Arabic).
>
Well, that's a strange sound change! How did it happen? (interested look)

> What do you think, Christophe?
>
That I have a lot of work to do :) . But frankly, I don't think it will be so
difficult to achieve a nice Arabo-Romance lang. Latin and Arabic seem quite
incompatible at first, but if you look deeper inside, you always find ways to
solve incompatibility problems :) .

>
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:31:49 -0500, Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
> wrote:
>
> >I haven't figured out a way to develop /3/ (`ayin) and /H/ (hhet)
> >pharyngeal fricatives, although they exist in borrowings from Hebrew
> and
> >Aramaic (along with 'free' /s/ and /z/).
>
> 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).
>
> For Romano-Arabic, I'd think of some two-step change, e. g.:
>
> 1) (clusters with) r (in certain environments?) yield uvular [R] and
> [X] which then get weakened to pharyngeal [3], [H];
>
> 2) in certain environments velars change to uvular [R] ('ghain'), [X].
>
> (or the other way round; note that in both cases no glottalized stops
> need to be involved).
>
That's nice, since I really want to have them :) . I had thought of the use of r
for that too, but I didn't know how to achieve it. The change to uvular is quite
likely (see French :)) ). Another idea I have is the change that brought /x/
into Spanish. If I'm not mistaken, what happened in Spanish was /S/ -> /x/. Am I
right?

>
> >> c' (or already s') > [s.] ('emphatic' s)
> >
> >What do you mean by c' here? Ejective palatal stop, or affricate maybe?
> I
> >don't remember ever coming across anything about palatal sounds other
> than
> >/j/ in Proto-Semitic or Arabic.
>
> I meant the ejective pair to [t_s]. However, the existence of
> proto-Semitic
> palatal stops/affricates is quite probable (it could be the row that
> yielded
> the interdentals in Arabic).
>
I'm still waiting for your comprehensive table Vasiliy. I'm quite lost here :) .

> >> (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').
>
I have to look at that.

>
> On Sun, 28 Jan 2001 01:33:20 -0600, Danny Wier <dawier@...>
> wrote:
>
> >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 in Proto-Arabic the consonnant of the article was not assimilated by the
'solar' consonnants? Too bad, I wanted to include that feature in my
Arabo-Romance lang. Well, I think I can still. How did it happen then?

> >Based on Proto-Semitic reconstruction, I think Arabic th, dh and emph.
> z
> >came from tS, dZ, emph. tS (emphatic being ejective or
> pharyngealized).
>
> ... or palatal stops, or something alike... but hardly just
> fricatives.
>
Whether they were palatal stops or affricates, they would certainly end up as
affricates in the Proto-Arabo-Romance lang :) (and then be simplified as in
French certainly).

>
> Hey Christophe, do you think you can make use of all this?
>
Yes, even though it's a little difficult to digest :) . A lot of useful
information!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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