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North African langs during the Roman Empire

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 3:16 am
by Tengado
What languages were spoken in the Roman Empire in north Africa during and at the end of the Roman Empire? I've tried googling but I'm not getting anywhere.

I was just reading an article about creating romlangs, and it occurred to me that a North African one with influence from African langs might be interesting, but I don't know what they were :S

Re: North African langs during the Roman Empire

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 3:35 am
by sangi39
Tengado wrote:What languages were spoken in the Roman Empire in north Africa during and at the end of the Roman Empire? I've tried googling but I'm not getting anywhere.

I was just reading an article about creating romlangs, and it occurred to me that a North African one with influence from African langs might be interesting, but I don't know what they were :S
Well the most obvious one is Demotic Egyptian. Punic, according to writers like Hippo, was still spoken in North Africa as well. I'd assume some form of the Berber languages were spoken in the area as well. According to the Wikipedia on Proto-Berber there were, apparently, Roman records of Berber people but it's not further explained.

Generally, it seems, the languages of North Africa at this point were all Afro-Asiatic.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 4:52 am
by Salmoneus
Berber. With a level of Punic imposed near the coast from Libya to Algeria. And Egyptian, obviously, in Egypt, though I'm not sure to what extent it had been replaced by Greek - certainly the upper classes spoke Greek. And Greek would have been known in a lot of the rest of the African cities as well, thanks to colonisation and trade.

If you find good resources on Punic, or Roman-era Berber, do let me know!

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 7:54 am
by brandrinn
You may not be able to find Punic info, but Phoenician is reasonably well-documented. And internal reconstruction can probably tell you enough about Roman-era Berber for the purposes of your romlang. But what kind of vulgar Latin did they speak in north Africa? Was it east romance? West? Other?

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 8:37 am
by Tengado
Maybe I am being unusually crap. but all I can find on phoenician is a phoneme list on wikipedia, and mentions of a detailed book that I am in no position to buy.

I'm toying with the idea of having it developed from Classical Latin instead. The internal reason perhaps would be that it was Classical Latin learned by speakers of Phoenician/Punic, then later used as a kind of lingua franca.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 9:13 am
by Dewrad
The most significant thing we know about the Latin spoken in North Africa is that the long and short vowels merged, giving a vowel system much like that of Sardinian: simply /i e a o u/.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 9:59 am
by Salmoneus
Do we know length was neutralised entirely?
We do know that (possibly as a first step) lengths became 'wrong' - short vowels were lengthened in some stressed syllables and long vowels were sometimes shortened in unstressed syllables.

We also have some records regarding palatalisation, but I can't remember what they are. We know that Africans apparently had an 'unusual' value for /s/, but we don't know what it was.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 10:01 am
by Cedh
Around the end of the Roman Empire, the Vandals arrived in NW Africa. They spoke a (probably East) Germanic language, which they appear to have dropped rather quickly in favor of Latin. It could nevertheless have an influence on a North African romlang though, at least in the form of some loanwords and one or two syntactical developments.

Adam Walker of the CONLANG list has a rather well-developed romlang based on the same scenario: Carrajina.

Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 3:06 am
by hwhatting
Dewrad wrote:The most significant thing we know about the Latin spoken in North Africa is that the long and short vowels merged, giving a vowel system much like that of Sardinian: simply /i e a o u/.
I also have seen it claimed in Romance linguistic works that Sardinian shares isolglosses with North African (Vulgar) Latin, FWIW. Can't check the details because I've left these books in Germany. But what it probably means is that no Romance linguist will beat Tengado up in a dark alley if he makes his North African Romlang share traits with Sardinian.

Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 1:15 pm
by David McCann
For Phoenician and Punic, see The languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, which is a reprint from The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world's ancient languages. The problem with including Phoenician influences is getting a list of vocabulary. With Berber, you could cheat and use the modern dialects.

Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 2:06 pm
by Beli Orao
Wasn't the Lingua Franca creole partially based on some African Romance dialect?

Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 7:48 pm
by Dewrad
heremaecg wrote:Wasn't the Lingua Franca creole partially based on some African Romance dialect?
If you're referring to this lingua franca, then no.

Posted: Sat May 22, 2010 3:57 am
by hwhatting
David McCann wrote:For Phoenician and Punic, see The languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, which is a reprint from The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world's ancient languages. The problem with including Phoenician influences is getting a list of vocabulary. With Berber, you could cheat and use the modern dialects.
With Phoenician, you could cheat by using Hebrew and Aramaic and applying the necessary sound changes; IIRC, the differences would not be very big anyway.

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 6:01 am
by Drydic
hwhatting wrote:
David McCann wrote:For Phoenician and Punic, see The languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, which is a reprint from The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world's ancient languages. The problem with including Phoenician influences is getting a list of vocabulary. With Berber, you could cheat and use the modern dialects.
With Phoenician, you could cheat by using Hebrew and Aramaic and applying the necessary sound changes; IIRC, the differences would not be very big anyway.
This is probably your best bet. In most cases we don't exactly know what the vowel values were in Phoenician/Punic, so it works. Not like Hebrew and Aramaic were that far apart in these regards.

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 6:14 am
by the duke of nuke
Hebrew is the closest living relative to Punic... as said, extrapolating from there is probably a good and useful idea.

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 6:18 am
by Drydic
thedukeofnuke wrote:Hebrew is the closest living relative to Punic... as said, extrapolating from there is probably a good and useful idea.
Just be sure and use the oldest forms you can find - they're likely to be the easiest to switch over. I've dabbled a bit in this, and there are quite a few cases where I misplaced copy/pastes & couldn't figure out which was Old Hebrew and Phoenician until I got my Phoenician book* back out.



*A Phoenician-Punic Grammar, Charles R. Krahmalkov. Handbuch der Orientalistik Vol. 54.