North African langs during the Roman Empire

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Tengado
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North African langs during the Roman Empire

Post 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
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Re: North African langs during the Roman Empire

Post 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.
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Post 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 And Egyptian, obviously, in Egypt, though I'm not sure to what extent it had been replaced by Greek - certainly the upper classes spoke Greek.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!
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Post 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?
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Post 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.
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Post 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/.
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Post 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.
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Post 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.

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Post 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.

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Post 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.

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Post by Beli Orao »

Wasn't the Lingua Franca creole partially based on some African Romance dialect?

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Post 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.
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Post 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.

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Post 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.
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Post 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.
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Post 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.
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