Hello everyone,Is the following your "rather good argument"? I think your opponent knows better than you here, in most ways.
For those interested, below I quote a discussion, only lengthy at
first sight, it's not so bad, on the origin of the articel in
Central/NW Semitic. It is intended for those who are still in doubt, a
condition I would be happy relieve you of ;) Especially the end is
IMHO rather good argument that I hadn't thought of before. My opponent
knows a lot of comparative Sem. linguistics, maybe too much to be good
for him ;) but this is not always the best strategy.
...
Herman:
You are right: the question is, what is more natural in the case of
the "article", assimilation or dissimilation? Then you call the
examples kk > lk and jj > lj "unprecedented".
That's interesting. because in Egyptian Arabic we have: ikkursi "the
chair" or iggawaami`, "the mosques". Is Egyptian an example of even
further assimilation, or an example of (more conservative) original
gemination that did not dissimilate yet? I think the latter is the
case.
Obviously, the way the Arabic article is written (alif laam) doesn't
mean anything, as I hope you agree. ...
... If we have, in a number of
consonants, dissimilation to (a)lC, the spelling may well be based on
the dissimilation, not on the original gemination. ...
... In my own language,
Dutch, we write quite a lot of things that have nothing to do with
original phonetics.
If we then look purely at phonology, we find that, when we follow your
point of view, the original Arabic article is not 'al, but l. After
all, there may often be the short -a- vowel preceding -l-/the
gemination, but this -a- is always overruled by any preceding short
vowel in an open, ending syllable. The alif is always alifu l-wasl,
meaning that it is no consonant at all, it's just a letter signifying
the absence of any consonant, easy for spelling.
I don't think we can argue with that; it is hardly possible that the
alif of the "article" al- has quiesced, having once been a real
glottal stop, because Arabic has kept a lot, or most, of its original
glottal stops. I guess شمال shimaal vs. شمأل sham'al (found this word
in "Qifaa nabki" of Imru'u l-Qays) may be an exception I can think of,
where hamz has disappeared, but this may be also the force of
three-consonantal root building, or it may be that the poet, for
reasons of rhythm, couldn't use a long vowel there.
So we have the undeniable fact that in your conviction, only the
consonant -l- is the article in Arabic, not *'al. Where, then, is the
link with -han-, -ham-, or -hal- or whatever in other Semitic or other
than standard Arabic languages? If we present it in writing, we can
make people believe that *'al has something to do with *hal, *han, and
the like, but once we present the phonological facts, i.e. the Arabic
"article" is -l-, and the Hebrew sister "article" is -ha(n/l/m?), it
doesn't fit anymore: the parallel is too far-fetched.
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