Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

Sorry, folks, I am having a hard week (did you ever notice that writing
reports devours more time than the job itself?)

There've been a few messages in this thread I must have replied to
earlier...

I'll lump all replies in one longish post.

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)...


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.

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?).

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).

What do you think, Christophe?


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).

> However, i couldn't find a word in my Latin
>dictionary that Spanish _interesante_ could have developed directly
>from... does anyone know the proper VL/PR word?
In Spanish (as in the other European langs) it's a learned (but mutilated)
latinism, ultimately < intersum (interesse).


On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 16:12:40 -0600, Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...>
wrote:

>> 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).

>> (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').

Some grammars (e. g. Brockelmann) mention, besides, that [i:] from
contracted combinations with [w] is pronounced [ü:] in certain varieties
of traditional style of declamation. Dunno any details.


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.).

>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.


Hey Christophe, do you think you can make use of all this?


Basilius