Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

Sorry to answer so late, but I'm in the middle of a 3-week period of exams. My
free time is thus a lot diminished... :(

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>
> > - I'm wondering about the historical plausibility of it. The fact is
> that I
> > don't know anithing about the history of Arabic. Where does it come
> from? What
> > did it look like 2000 years ago? Is it plausible to have Roman
> settling in an
> > Arabic-speaking place of 2000 years ago?
>
> There actually was such a thing: Mozarabic, the language spoken by
> Christians in el-Andalus, the Muslim caliphate of Southern Spain.
> We know very little about it, only some putative borrowings into
> Spanish, plus some vaguely Romance-looking refrains in otherwise
> Arabic songs.  This should give lots of opportunity for ingenious
> conlangers.
>
Too bad that we know nearly nothing about it, it would have be a nice help for
me :) .

> Of course the time-frame is different: Arabic arrived in Iberia only
> in 800 or so.  It sounds like you want something older.  In the
> pre-Muslim period, Arabs traveled widely throughout the Middle East,
> but
> their main contacts with unrelated lgs ould have been with Greek.
> In some of Harry Turtledove's stories, Muhammad rather than founding
> a new religion becomes a Christian monk widely famous for his Greek
> hymns, and later canonized as St. Moamet, the patron of changes.
> ("There is no god but God, and Jesus Christ is the Son of God"!)
>
Well, for my Arabo-Romance lang, I'm thinking of adding a lot of Greek
borrowings in the Romance superstrate. That would give nice consonnant clusters
not habitual in Latin.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr