Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

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.

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"!)

> - My only resource for Arabic is a "Teach Yourself Arabic" which teaches the
> Modern Litteral Arabic (not the dialects),
The usual English term is "modern standard Arabic".

> - How old is the Arabic alphabet? I suppose it's a sister alphabet of the Hebrew
> one, but did it already exist 2000 years ago, or was it devised later?
It was not really devised: rather the Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic,
and Thaana typographical traditions evolved in different directions
from a common base.  (Greek too, of course).

> Was it
> always used for the Arabic language or did they take it from another language?
AFAIK it was used for Arabic first; today, of course, it is or has been
used for hundreds of languages in the Middle East, North Africa,
the former Soviet Union, the Indian peninsula, and Southeast Asia.

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