Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

>
> What about soldiers who got completely beaten in a war, and didn't want
> to return to Rome because of embarrassment - maybe people thought that
> they had been killed, and they didn't want to corrrect that by going
> back
> and having to face the anger of the rulers at the time?
>
It could be possible, but then I would have the trouble of having to begin with
Vulgar Latin, from which I know nearly nothing. With my ideas, I could put lots
of intellectuals among the settlers, and thus could use more easily my
knowledge of Classical Latin :) .

>
> Also, would it be likely that the Jûdajca verb conjugations -ÂL/R,
> -ÊL/R,
> and -ÎL/R would acquire connotations of the Hebrew paradigms _pâ`al_
> (simple), _pi`êl_ (intensive), and _hip`îl_ (causative), possibly
> through
> borrowings from Hebrew that align with those endings because of the
> phonetic similarity?
>
Well, it seems very difficult to me. Personnally, I am thinking for my Arabo-
Romance conlang of a major overhaul of the conjugation system, to make it look
more Arabic than Romance. To achieve that, I have thought of the following
developments:

- to match together the SOV order of Latin with the VSO order of Arabic, I have
thought of a transitional soVSO order, which consists of a VSO order with
personal and demonstrative pronouns in front of the verb to anticipate the real
S and O which appear after the verb,
- with lots of sound changes which would affect the end of words and
agglutination of the s pronoun to the verb, the conjugation would look more
like Arabic, with prefixes rather than suffixes. The tense oppositions would
also be simplified (with certainly loss of the future in favor of the
subjunctive - since with many verbs both are quite alike and the meaning of the
subjunctive can often match the one of a future -),
- the result would be VSO order with Arabic-like conjugation of verbs, though
the origin would be purely Romance!

I don't know how likely such a scheme is, but it seems rather plausible to me.
Add to it the loss of the verb ESSE, except in other tenses than present (like
Arabic kaana), quite plausible, the formation of a conjugated negation by
fusion of NON and ESSE (like NOLLE comes from NON VOLLE), the use of a form "to
me is" for "I have" (existing in Latin and normal in Arabic), leading to the
complete disappearance of HABERE, all this under the influence of the Arabic
substratum, and you get from Latin a rather Arabic-looking verbal morphology
and syntax, though without hiatus with the original Latin :) . So I think many
things are possible, as long as you can think of plausible changes leading from
one position to another.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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