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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Portuguese /x/?
Message-ID: <CxszG7.LC@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <37rmqg$34v@gordon.enea.se> <37s0cj$l34@uwm.edu> <37se1m$bg0@agate.berkeley.edu> <37sts1$ro8@uwm.edu>
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 06:02:30 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <37sts1$ro8@uwm.edu>, Alan D Corre <corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>In article <37se1m$bg0@agate.berkeley.edu> coby@euler.Berkeley.EDU (Jacob  Lubliner) writes:
>>In article <37s0cj$l34@uwm.edu>,
>>Alan D Corre <corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>>>In article <37rmqg$34v@gordon.enea.se> sommar@enea.se
>>(Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>>> [deletedf]
>> Further south, other Romance dialects were
>>spoken in the Middle Ages, but they were weakened (if not altogether
>>displaced) by Arabic.  
>
>It seems to me that it is difficult to know just what the language situation
>was in the middle ages. A language descended in some way from Latin was
>spoken, but not written (they doubtless looked on it as a barbaric form of
>Latin, which remained the scholarly written language) and along came a
>Semitic language which was also unwritten, and probably not a direct
>descendant of Classical Arabic at all, while Classical Arabic was used as
>the written language. The harjas of Arabic poems, written in Romance in
>Arabic characters, suggest that these languages coexisted. Modern nation
>states favor a standard language (think of what went on in the former Soviet
>union to foster Russian over many other languages). In Spain, Andalusian is
>close to Castillian, and did not present the problems of the various
>languages and dialects of the north which often diverge sharply from
>Castillian.
>

The Romance language of Arab-dominated Spain is often referred to as
"moza'rabe".  Not much indeed is known about it, apart from the 
jarchas (as it's spelled in Spain), a few glosses and place-names.
But what little we know proves that Andalusian as it spoken today is
a dialect of Castilian, not descended from loacl "mozarabic" dialects.
It's a pity the language did not survive, really.  Baetica (modern
Andalusia) was one of the most heavily Romanized parts of the Roman
Empire: Seneca, Martialis and Trajan all came from there.  Castilian,
on the other hand, can with some exaggeration be called a Latin creole
spoken on the borders of un-Romanized Basque country.
One thing that is known about (certain forms of) moza'rabe, for instance, 
is that p, t and k did not become voiced in intervocalic position (like in
Italian and Romanian), e.g. past particles in -ato, -atu, instead
of Castilian -ado (generally pronounced -au nowadays).

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
