Be'27 Feb 2003 wektaba Danny Wier <[log in to unmask]>

>| The bit in the inner quotes is in Aramaic and "earth" is written once
>| with /3/ and once with /q/!

> They might've been used interchangeably, or Proto-Semitic <s'.>
> (emphatic voiceless lateral fricative) became /?\/ in one form of
> Aramaic and /q/ in another. I'd have to read into that. I got some .pdf
> files on Semitic orthography and phonetics I need to study.

To my mind, the alternation suggests a voiced uvular stop /G\/ since <q>
gets everything right but the voicing, and <3> is right apart from being
a fricative (maybe?) rather than a stop. /G\/ isn't too far from the
arabic /d./ (/d~/ if you like) and could have resulted from assimilating
the point of articulation to the "gutteral colouring", (cf the change in
Celtic and Greek of PIE /k_w/ >> /p/ where a labialised velar stop
becomes a plain labial). But to get either /G\/ or /d./ from an
"emphatic voiceless lateral fricative" means that you throw away
everything in the description apart from "emphatic"! That's why I'd like
to reconstruct a ProtoSem /d./ /l./ /dl./ or somesuch. The emphatics as
a whole aren't especially common and the rarer ones would have had a
very low functional load, so an original orthogonal "grid" could easily
get obscured by mergers. /d./ and/or /l./ might have merged with /t./ or
/s./ or /d/ or /l/ in various langs, assuming the latter were more
frequent. /l./ >> /3/ = [R] might also be feasible.


> Sergei Starosin has something like this for an inventory for P-Semitic:

> b p p' d t t' dz ts ts' s dZ tS tS' S tl tl' g k k' gw kw k'w X R H 3 h
> ? m n r l w y / a i u a: i: u:

Well if he's allowed waifs and strays from PIE like /gw/ etc (and
emphatics with everything) I ought to be able to slip in an extra 3ayin
and a series of voiced emphatics /d. dz. dl. dD./ >> /d. z. l. D./
:-)

> Which isn't much different than Bomhard's Nostratic inventory, or
> (ObConlang) Old Tech.

Hmm, must have a proper look at Tech. As for Nostratic, lets see a
credible reconstruction of Afroasiatic first. If there's one on the web
please direct me thither.

> The status of uvular fricatives: they were probably once stops: [q] [G\]
> that became fricatives.

A conditioned split, later phonemised (is that the word?) ???

BTW I don't consider this entirely off-topic, because the sort of wild
experimentation that conlanging entails is IMHO likely to throw up
useful novel ideas re natlangs.

Nentatam,

Keith Mylchreest