Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 12:17:01PM -0500, Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2001 15:50:45 -0600, Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...>
> wrote:
>
> >> >> (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.
>
> Yes.
Hmm. I suppose they would be different phonemes, then...

> >> >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?
>
> Oops... I'm afraid I used the two terms as synonyms (or rather,
> understood the latter as a subset of the former). Am I wrong here?
Actually, I'm not sure. They might be the same, but I thought lateral
release was something different.

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo