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

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 20:33:05 -0500 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
writes:
>Well,  "hoc" et al. were "this";  "ille" "that"; "iste" was (IIRC)
>"that", as in "*that* man is someone I just can't stand" (negative
>tone).   "Hoc" dropped out of the language (except in some phrases,
>as others have mentioned;  German "heute" comes from Latin "hodie",
>having undergone the High German soundshift);  "ille" developed into
>the articles;  "iste" had various fates, sometimes being dropped (I
>think)
>and sometimes become a regular demonstrative.
>> So, let's see...in Judean _hoc_ would be pronounced [hox].  And if
>the
>> [x] gets absorbed before other consonants, there could be:
>> (using the previous possible words)
>Wait:  what's causing the fricativization?  Normally, when
>phonological
>rules come along, they're generalized as much as possible, so that,
>e.g.,
>all final voiceless stops will fricativize (or something like that).
>If
>such a rule came along, you'd have <p> and <t> becoming /f/ and
>/s/ (or /T/) respectively.  (Of course, this may not affect your
>language
>much if you don't have many final stop consonants).
It's a Hebrew thing called _beged-kefet_, which has parallels in other
languages, like Spanish.
Certain consonants become fricatives in certain environments (usually
intervocalically), like in the Spanish word _ciudad_, which is pronounced
more like [siuDaD] than [siudad].

The Judean version affects the consonants b, c, d, g, p, t, which have
'hard' and 'soft' forms:
B - [b] [B]
C - [k] [x]
D - [d] [z]
G - [g] [G]
P - [p] [P]
T - [t] [s]

When ending a syllable, or after a long vowel, the consonant becomes a
fricative.  Beginning a syllable after a consonant, or after a short
vowel with another vowel afterwards, it's a stop.

>Here's a question:  I seem to remember linguists reconstructing
>a /T/ phoneme for Protosemitic; is that true, and if so, did it
>survive
>into any stage of Hebrew?
If i remember correctly, Proto-Semitic's /T/ merged with /S/ in Hebrew.
/T/ was later reborn as the fricative form of /t/.  That happened a lot
with Hebrew's beged-kefet - sounds were lost, and then recreated as a
totally different phoneme.  Hebrew's original beged-kefet fricatives were
probably /v G D x f T/.  Over time, different dialects lost and/or
changed the values of various of these.

So, with the possible Judean word _hoc_ for "the", by itself it would be
pronounced [hox], in a sentence like "where's the...the...you know what i
mean, where is it?"  When really used, the [x] would drop away, merging
to geminate the first consonant of a consonant-initial word, such as
*hoppele [hoppElE].  If the word began with a vowel, the C would harden,
and you'd have something like *hocalas [hokalaS].

>=======================================================
>Tom Wier <artabanos@...>

-Stephen (Steg)
 "God punishes - humans take revenge."

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