Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 11:16:34AM +0100, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>:
> > 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?
Correct. And the /S/ itself often came from an earlier /Z/, which came from
Latin /lj/ (and possibly other sources, but I can't think of any right now).
And today in some parts of Spain, /x/ is really a harsh uvular sound. Could
easily become pharyngeal, I think :) Also, /x/ sometimes came from /h/,
which came sometimes from Latin /f/ but sometimes was the result of
hypercorrection. This kind of hypercorrection was especially common in
Andalusia, IIRC, as in the word <Jándalo> /"xandalo/ "Andalusian." So maybe
you could use hypercorrection to put /h/ at the beginnings of words which
would otherwise start with vowels.

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo
Conlang code:
CU !lh:m cN:R:S:G a+ y n2d:1d !R* A-- E L* N1 Id:m k- ia- p+ m- o+ P-- d* b+++ lainesco

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