Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

At 1:35 pm -0500 25/1/01, John Cowan wrote:
>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?
A bit sandy in Arabia Felix (more or less modern Saudi Arabia).  It wasn't
till the spread of Islam in the 6th cent. AD that Arabic spread outside of
its homeland.  It's difficult to imagine why Romans might want to settle
there 2000 years back unless, in some alternative history, Archimedes was
not killed in the sack of Syracuse but settled in Roman & invented the
internal combustion engine and then the Romans discovered gulf oil   :)

>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.
Yes, a few years back someone (I forget whom) proposed an Arabo-Romance
conlang, imagining Arab settlement IIRC in southern Provence after the
Muslims were halted in their advance by Charles Martel.  I mentioned
Mozarabic at that time; it appears to have been a Arab influenced
Romancelang and IIRC was written in the Arabic script.

I've heard no more about the Provençal Arabo-Romance conlang.

>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.
It would indeed.

>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"!)
That stretches the imagination somewhat even for me (who can imagine
Archimedes inventing the internal combustion engine) !

>> - 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).
Yep, it evolved.

>> Was it
>> always used for the Arabic language or did they take it from another
>>language?
>
>AFAIK it was used for Arabic first;
Yes, it was script used in Mecca in Muhammad's time and in which the Koran
was written, which meant, of course, that it then replaced all other local
variants.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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