AH Challenge: "Arabized" Spanish

Although Spanish is a Romance language, due to its history it has some influence from Arabic (especially Andalusian Spanish and the Latin American dialects that derive from it); however, Spanish does not some of the sounds that Arabic has - especially the uvular and pharyngeal consonants. Therefore, your challenge, should you accept it, is to make Spanish sound more like Arabic than in OTL with a POD no earlier than the beginning of the Caliphate of Córdoba.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Loan phonemes of this sort are possible in languages that have a) adopted huge numbers of loan words from another language, thus ensuring that the sound thus adopted is distinctive rather than merely marginal and b) the continuing prestige of the donor language makes it unlikely that the loan words will be phonetically nativized. I also suspect that this is only possible in speech communities where a stable bilingualism exists (note, for example, that the Arabic language is prestigious in Iran as the language of the Qur'an, and that the total Farsi lexicon is largely Arabic, but words with pharyngeal or pharyngealized sounds have been assimilated to the phonology of Farsi).

As far as I can see, these conditions are only met in Mozarabic, so what we're looking at is some form of Mozarabic surviving and becoming the lingua franca of the Iberian peninsula.
 
As far as I can see, these conditions are only met in Mozarabic, so what we're looking at is some form of Mozarabic surviving and becoming the lingua franca of the Iberian peninsula.


Hmm, interesting. What was the original Mozarabic phonology like (according to the current data)? Was it similar to Old Spanish?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Hmm, interesting. What was the original Mozarabic phonology like (according to the current data)? Was it similar to Old Spanish?
It's hard to tell because the vowels necessarily need to be supplied and the script may carry distinctions over from the source language not found in the target language (like the Persian script). But the vogue is to reconstruct it as not markedly different from the rest of Iberian Romance at the time.
 
As far as I can see, these conditions are only met in Mozarabic, so what we're looking at is some form of Mozarabic surviving and becoming the lingua franca of the Iberian peninsula.

It would be so easy to make arabic the lingua franca of the Iberian peninsula and later, to create a spanish evolved from that and not from latin. Why would be use mozarabic languages. There were many of them. Which would be used?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
It would be so easy to make arabic the lingua franca of the Iberian peninsula and later, to create a spanish evolved from that and not from latin. Why would be use mozarabic languages. There were many of them. Which would be used?
I'm not sure that was what he was looking for. For starters, if Arabic replaced Romance in Iberia, the whole notion of "Spanish" would probably be butterflied away entirely (then again, the same is probably true for any process that made some form of Mozarabic the prestige dialect of Romance in the Iberian peninsula...).
 
I'm not sure that was what he was looking for. For starters, if Arabic replaced Romance in Iberia, the whole notion of "Spanish" would probably be butterflied away entirely (then again, the same is probably true for any process that made some form of Mozarabic the prestige dialect of Romance in the Iberian peninsula...).
I know that is not what he was looking for but if arabic replaced romance in Iberica (It wouldn´t be so difficult), then you "could" asist to an evolution of the Arabic (I think that a Moroccan and a Syrian Arabic is so different that they can not understand themselves) so you could get a "Spanish" (I don´t know, let´s suposse 60% arabic, 25% latin, 15% germanic (visigoths, alans, suevians...), etc.)

If you want to make mozarabic language="spanish", you already have castilian, catalan, galaico-portugués, navarro-aragones (sorry, I don´t know how to translate the latests), that already were so strongly influenced by arabic and were much less languages to choose (yet many), because if you want to get some mozarabic (a romanic languages that were not much more Arabized than the norther), you´ll get so problems. It was the language of the Mozarabic people, one of the lower classes of "classist" Al Andalus
and you have dozens of them, which one do you choose? How do you make to expand it to the rest of the peninsula?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
It was the language of the Mozarabic people, one of the lower classes of "classist" Al Andalus
and you have dozens of them, which one do you choose? How do you make to expand it to the rest of the peninsula?
Well, for starters, the Mozarabic of the extant texts doesn't demonstrate significant dialectal differences. You're right that there had to be dialects and sub-dialects (how could there not be?) but the difference between them was definitely not so profound that we could rightly consider them separate languages. I doubt very much that Mozarabes from one end of the continuum could not comprehend those from another.

As for your first point, the fact that Mozarabic was relatively low-prestige is actually quite essential to our positing its adoption of loan phonemes. Dan originally asked for a Spanish that had pharyngeal consonants. Unless we're dealing with people who are effectively bilingual (and who hold the donor language in high prestige relative to their home language), this is extremely unlikely.

The example of Persian is most instructive here: even with dozens of Iranian dialects (including some non-Iranian languages), and the disappearance of literacy in the region, the Southwestern Iranian dialect of Fars still won out in the end, although it was severely Arabicized, and became the lingua franca not only of Iran but a huge chunk of the rest of the world as well.
 
Well, for starters, the Mozarabic of the extant texts doesn't demonstrate significant dialectal differences. You're right that there had to be dialects and sub-dialects (how could there not be?) but the difference between them was definitely not so profound that we could rightly consider them separate languages. I doubt very much that Mozarabes from one end of the continuum could not comprehend those from another.

As for your first point, the fact that Mozarabic was relatively low-prestige is actually quite essential to our positing its adoption of loan phonemes. Dan originally asked for a Spanish that had pharyngeal consonants. Unless we're dealing with people who are effectively bilingual (and who hold the donor language in high prestige relative to their home language), this is extremely unlikely.

The example of Persian is most instructive here: even with dozens of Iranian dialects (including some non-Iranian languages), and the disappearance of literacy in the region, the Southwestern Iranian dialect of Fars still won out in the end, although it was severely Arabicized, and became the lingua franca not only of Iran but a huge chunk of the rest of the world as well.

If you consider the languages of Portugal, Leon, Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Catalunya as the same language, well ok, there could be only one mozarabic language. It is a matter of percentages, I never studied portuguese, but I would underestand it and above all, if we are talking about read. So yeah, I suposse that if we were hundreds of years ago, there could be called dialects. When I studied history (It was decades ago), the profesors say me that there were dozens mozarabic languages, but if you want to call them dialects (to consider that in the middle age, when already the romans could not keep the Latin "intact" as language,
the mozarabs speak in only one language that resist the islamic dominance whitout divided into several languages but only in dialects, well I find it difficult but it´s acceptable).

About the second paragraph, I´m not saying that mozarabic language could not get whatever you want to get of the arabic. I´m saying that this hipotetical mozarabic would be a dead language because the northern kingdoms never would use that language of lower clases as lingua franca and the northern kingdoms win the reconquista so... If you want loan phonemes, you need to transfer them to the northern languages and here it´s my point of view: Why do you want a piece when it could be easy to get all the cake?


About the third paragraph, although I do not like the comparison (do not get me wrong, it's not that I don´t like Iranians but is that Spain and the entire peninsula is a world apart, we still are Africa), your farsi it´s called here castilian and get above a 15 or 20% of arabic (I don´t remember the exact figures). Let´s supose that we lost in that so called "Reconquista" and the so called Al Andalus conquer the whole peninsula and never be divided. Now you still get the arabic as lingua franca because we still are Spanish. You could call us andalusies, castilians, portuguese or wharever. We hardly never acted like the rest of the world. There is a saying "somos cuarenta millones the personas y ninguna meamos de la misma forma" that means that only if you get a superpower like Cartago, Rome or Arabia, you could get only one language in our regions. For god´s sake, we weren´t so far to let nahualt or quechua being the oficial languages of Mexico and Peru!
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
People didn't just wake up one day and suddenly realize that they were speaking Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and what have you and that they couldn't understand Latin anymore; it's much more complicated than that. For starters, the "Latin" spoken by Roman colonists all over the Empire was already different from the written standard, even before they left; they were already Vulgar. These forms of Vulgar Latin were the basis of the modern Romance languages, and it took many centuries for them to evolve to the point where they were no longer mutually comprehensible. This is reflected in the writing systems, which are somewhat artificially frozen at an intermediate point between the Vulgar Latin of Late Antiquity and the Romance languages of today. That's the reason why the written forms are so much more easy to understand.

In any case, there are Pacific Islands with more linguistic diversity than all of Europe.


Judging by what you said about Spain in your last post, the example of Iran is not too far off the mark. Did you know that fewer than half of all Iranians speak Farsi as their native tongue? Ethnolinguistic nationalism threatens to tear the place apart, with American encouragement.
 
I don't know if this is relevant or just a strange case, but Turkish still has some minor Arabic sounds in it, even after they were deliberately engineered out, along with the larger portion of the alien vocabulary - mostly the palatized "a". Does that fall under the "massive imported vocabulary" rule?

Most of those "a"s now serve no purpose; there may be a handful of cases where it distinguishes two words.
 
In fact this is exactly how the languages born. Yesterday, hey, we speak catalan, today, hey we can´t speak catalan nomore, this is "valenciano",yesterday hey we are speaking castilian, today, hey, that´s andaluz, yesterday, hey we speak latin, today, hey, this is not latin, this is castilian, yesterday, hey, I´m a monk and I do not understand this book written in Latin, I´m going to write the translation. It´s a percentaje question. When you reach one point after centuries of evolution (point that could get decades), this is nomore a dialect, it´s a different language. I´m in one side of the peninsula,
the next village, I see that there is a different word in his vocabulary​
and when I get the other side of the empire, I´m talking in romanian. Yeah, you could call that dialects, ok, but when start them to be called as different languages?. I insist, we are talking about centuries ago, they could be called as dialects, they could underestand themselves, it´s good, I accept that but if the romanic languages born about eight or nine century, it´s difficult to me to think that the mozarabic languages were only one
About latin, no this isn´t exactly how it happens. Yeah, it were two different languages but french and the other romanic languages didn´t exactly born by that and I´m going to gave you one example: the castilian didn´t born because they already get two latins, the castilian born because romans already get two latins and Basque people didn´t speak good Vulgar latin (Yeah, I know, it´s rare, they hardly are the responsible people of spanish born and now they don´t want to be spanish) and I supose that the rest of the so divided peninsula speak their manner of vulgar, we were not SPANISH until the romans, even we weren´t exactly the same as France because in France they were hardly all celts. We only were Iberia because we are a peninsula. Here you could found dozens of tribes of celts, iberians, celtiberians, Basques, germans. Even in ancient times, Hispania were one thing and Gallaecia was another.

About the question of Iran, we are not the sons of a islamic conquer, we are the sons of a Christian "recconquista". If someone is going to put the language, it would be Castile, Portugal or Aragon, NEVER Granada. I´m exactly saying that Iran isn´t a good example because in Iran farsi survived in spite of Islam but here, mozarabic languages survived only by those who were Christians. You only could get an species of farsi if you get Al Andalus thriumphant here and you´ll only get that converting us all so no mozarabic languages at all. If you get here a surviving Al Andalus you´ll still get the arabic as spanish language because we are so different, we are not Iran.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
In fact this is exactly how the languages born. Yesterday, hey, we speak catalan, today, hey we can´t speak catalan nomore, this is "valenciano",yesterday hey we are speaking castilian, today, hey, that´s andaluz, yesterday, hey we speak latin, today, hey, this is not latin, this is castilian, yesterday, hey, I´m a monk and I do not understand this book written in Latin, I´m going to write the translation. It´s a percentaje question. When you reach one point after centuries of evolution (point that could get decades), this is nomore a dialect, it´s a different language. I´m in one side of the peninsula,
the next village, I see that there is a different word in his vocabulary​
and when I get the other side of the empire, I´m talking in romanian.
I can assure you that this is definitely not how languages are born. In the case of Romance, the written standard (Latin) was already different in some important respects from the vernacular(s). It is not unimaginable that this situation could have been perpetuated to the present date (indeed, Arabic provides the best example of a diglossic situation in which an artificially frozen written standard is used by speakers of vernaculars which have diverged to the point of becoming incomprehensible to one another, yet still considered one and the same language). The problem was not so much that Latin suddenly became incomprehensible overnight or even from one generation to the next, but that it had already been somewhat incomprehensible for several centuries for those who were uneducated, and then at some point someone made a politically motivated decision to substitute a standardized form of the vernacular for it. Intriguingly, this process began in Spain first, before it became the vogue elsewhere in the Romance-speaking world.

Languages are "born" almost entirely out of politics. That is why some "languages" that are mutually comprehensible (such as many of the Scandinavian languages, or Serbian and Croatian) are considered to be separate languages, but the Neo-Latin "dialects" of Italian or the Neo-Arabic "dialects" are not considered to be separate languages despite being somewhat incomprehensible. You have a dialect continuum, and eventually someone points at the dialect of a particular city and says "this is the official form, all other forms are patois". Thus begins education in a standardized form of the vernacular (Florentine Italian, Castillian Spanish, Parisian French, etc.).

About the question of Iran, we are not the sons of a islamic conquer, we are the sons of a Christian "recconquista". If someone is going to put the language, it would be Castile, Portugal or Aragon, NEVER Granada. I´m exactly saying that Iran isn´t a good example because in Iran farsi survived in spite of Islam but here, mozarabic languages survived only by those who were Christians. You only could get an species of farsi if you get Al Andalus thriumphant here and you´ll only get that converting us all so no mozarabic languages at all. If you get here a surviving Al Andalus you´ll still get the arabic as spanish language because we are so different, we are not Iran.
I'm not convinced that Romance will die out in Spain. Berber is still spoken by upwards of 40% of the population in Morocco, perhaps more, and the leap from Berber to Arabic is much easier than the leap from Spanish to Arabic... not to mention the fact that many of the Arabic speakers are the descendants of Bedu tribesmen who migrated to Morocco, and who are unlikely to cross over Mediterranean to Spain.
 
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