Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:

> At 3:24 am -0400 11/4/99, Steg Belsky wrote:
> >On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 20:58:57 -0500 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
> >writes:
>
> Yeah - the major (gentile) influence in that part of the world was Greek.
> I put gentile in parentheses since in fact some Jewish groups, e.g. in
> Alexandria, were Greek speaking at the time I assume 'Judean' was
> developing. And one must, I think, allow some Greek as well as Semitic
> coloring to your 'Judean-Romance'.
>
> (Thought: it might be interesting for some conlanger to "discover" a
> surviving Greek-based Jewish language :)
Well, there were huge Roman military contigents in that area of the world.
Four legions in the Levant, and two in Alexandria alone (which is comparable
in military strength to the fortifications along the Rhine and Danube).

But one more important thing I think one would have to consider is:  when
the Empire finally split into two, what effect would the increasingly Greek
eastern establishment have on this language?  It's not that it's impossible (as
I just said, there were lots of military units in the region), but that the main
reasons for the establishment of Latin in the West were twofold:  (a) Roman
_colonia_ (retired military personnel, who naturally spoke Latin themselves)
going out and settling down among the conquered peoples, and (b) the fact
that the West didn't already have a competitor language like Greek, so it was
only natural for Latin to rise to preeminance.  Out east, you had almost the exact
opposite:  an centuries long tradition of doing things the Greek way, and IIRC
the number of colonia was much fewer, partially because the East was already
heavily populated. (Although after the Fall of Jerusalem to Titus in 70, Jerusalem
itself was made into a Roman colony, with a Roman temple to Jupiter Capitolinus
and all, IIRC, so...).   So... the story is complex, as you can see.

But as Steg said, it's his conlang, so he can play around with it as he wants.
It's probably good to know the background, though :)

> >substrate (i think that's
> >the word), where there are no nasalized vowels.
>
> But there was almost certainly no nasalized vowel in the spoken Latin form
> either!  So there's no question of nasal vowels in 'Judean' in any case.
Especially since the people who'd be doing the colonizing weren't
from the upper class anyways...

> If you want the -m then it can only come about if we imagine that for some
> reason a group of Aramaic (or Aramaic & Greek) speaking Judeans decide to
> learn Classical Latin from written form only and then, for some strange
> reason, they or their descendants actually start speaking it.  I'm finding
> that a difficult scenario to envisage.
Right -- the literacy levels around that time were something no more
than, like, 5% or so, IIIC...

> >>...... Also, how do you reason the
> >>change from [w] to [f]?  I realize they're both labial, but why would
> >>it devoice like that?  For most cases of [pf] I've seen, if they
> >>change,
> >>turn into fricatives, not stops.
> >
> >In Judean, all /w/s turned into either [v] or [f], depending on the
> >environment.
>
> Fine - that I'll buy  :)
Yeah, I didn't say it was impossible -- it just seemed unlikely,
from my experience (which should always be qualified as such,
since the more you know, the more things get complicated:  there
are languages in Papua New Guinea which have regular changes
from plain fricatives (like [s]) to plain stops ([t])... so I suppose
just about anything could happen ;-)

> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> At 3:00 am -0400 11/4/99, Steg Belsky wrote:
> >On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 22:37:33 -0400 Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> writes:
> Also in eastern Romance we know that final -s did not survive; it either
> disappeared or changed to some voiced palatal sound.  So the NomAcc plural
> would likely to be /puellaZ/ or /puellaj/ - but maybe under the influence
> of 'puellaru' we find 'puellar'  :)   Also in some Greek dialects final -s
> regularly became -r.  It's known among scholars as 'rhotacism' and we could
> imagine it occuring in 'proto-Judean'.
Right -- but wasn't that relatively early? I mean, way before the period
we're talking about here, right? Like, before Classical Greek.

[skipping diagrams of hypothesized case system]

> Which is certainly different :)
It certainly is! Interesting...

=======================================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
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