zompist bboard

I'm looking for a good descriptive grammar and lexicon of Punic, the sort one could use to develop an a posteriori language.

There's one in this collection, under "Semitic".

In general, the preserved textual material in Punic is limited, so you'll probably have to draw on related Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic) to fill the gaps in grammar and lexicon.

KathTheDragon wrote:There's one in this collection, under "Semitic".

Fantastic! Thank you.

hwhatting wrote:In general, the preserved textual material in Punic is limited, so you'll probably have to draw on related Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic) to fill the gaps in grammar and lexicon.

Yes, I'm well aware of the difficulties. I'd already planned to fill in some gaps in the vocabulary with Hebrew (as I believe Civ5 did for Dido's dialogue) and to give my Neo-Carthaginians a helpful Aramaic adstrate.

If your Neo-Carthagineans are still located around Carthage, I'd consider Northern Berber and Arabic over Aramaic for convenient filling-in-Punic-gap loanwords (and possibly from Vandal via Gothic and African Romance, if you feel up to extrapolating a bit more). Though come to think of it, I'm not sure how much extrapolating you'll have to do for Berber as well, I don't know how reconstructions or attestations of that are before the last few hundred years.

Berbers yes, but the Arabs weren't in North Africa at the time...

Actually, my Neo-Carthaginians are in the Canaries. I had an idea for an alternate history in which Macaronesia (or at least the Canaries, the Azores, and Madeira) were populated from an earlier date, and I chose to populate the Canaries with Carthaginian refugees with a later adstrate of Aramaic speakers because reasons. (Honestly, by the 1490s when my intended story takes place, the reason there might have been Aramaic speakers as far west as the Canary Islands to bolster the grammar and lexicon of my Neo-Punic is millennium-old news.) The Azores, meanwhile, host an autochthonous Indo-European speaking population. I'm still pondering Madeira.

zompist wrote:Berbers yes, but the Arabs weren't in North Africa at the time...

Not at the time, no, but my suggestion was assuming they stayed in the area of Carthage during the Arabization of North Africa.

vokzhen wrote:

zompist wrote:Berbers yes, but the Arabs weren't in North Africa at the time...

Not at the time, no, but my suggestion was assuming they stayed in the area of Carthage during the Arabization of North Africa.

I'll definitely be picking up some Arabic loanwords from nearby Morocco and Al-Andalus/Grenada.