Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

I was looking for Maltese material on the web but have only found a
few snippits so far. However, it appears that Maltese developed a
special class of verbs for Romance loans that wouldn't fit into any
of the Arabic patterns. If this is true it might provide some
suggestions for arabised Romance.

Another point is that Sicily had a large Arabic speaking population
at one time, has it left it's mark on the local Romance? Would it be
a suitable place for an Arabo-Romance to have developed in another
time-line?

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In reply to Steg :

The first vowel in Hebrew words written like <melekh> with two
successive seghol vowel signs is believed by many authorities to have
been pronounced long (i.e. ['mE:lEx]) at the time the texts were
composed.

These words began with case endings in proto-semetic (as in Class.
Arab. and Akkadian) i.e.

QaTLum / QiTLum / QuTLum etc.

Then the endings dropped :

QaTL  /  QiTL  /  QuTL

Next a svarabhakti vowel developed between the 2nd and 3rd
consonants, probably beginning with consonants which didn't easily
form clusters, and then becoming generalised :

QaT@L  /  QiT@L  /  QuT@L

This vowel then became a permanent /E/

'QaTEL  /  'QiTEL  /  'QuTEL

So far nothing unusual, there are parallels in e.g. Welsh and
probably other IE langs that have lost final syllables.

However Hebrew developed a very strong dynamic stress, which
lengthened stressed vowels and reduced or eliminated ('silent shwa')
unstressed ones. In particular all vowels in open stressed syllables
have to be long. So the above forms developed to :

'Qa:TEL  /  'Qe:TEL /  'Qo:TEL

The last two are found everywhere, but 'Qa:TEL only in pausa.
Normally it becomes <QeTeL>, no one seems to know quite why, but the
stress rules require the first vowel to be long. It couldn't have
been [e:] as this would have been pointed with cere (two dots not
three). The best assumption therefore is that seghol here represents
a lengthened open [E:]

All my sources are decades old, so maybe modern linguists have other
explanations.


Keith

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