zompist bboard

I have a few questions regarding a project I'm working on, related only in the sense that they involve the same project.

1. Are foreign place names--especially culturally significant ones--likely to be reborrowed or morphologically leveled if they become too unrecognizable? For context, I'm working on a Late Medieval form of Punic spoken in the Canary Islands by Syriac Christians. Vowel reduction is going to mangle certain place names. The one that prompted this question is this: Yerūsalêm > ʾirūslêm. Given the symbolic prominence of Jerusalem in Christian imagery, should I expect prominent foreign names like Jerusalem to be reborrowed from Syriac, or am I overthinking something that isn't really a problem?

2. While I haven't found any Punic or Phoenician interjections, I've been able to mine a few from Biblical Hebrew. Could someone point me to the interjection used in any Semitic language for hushing a child, like "shh" or "hush" in English? If not, I can get creative (I was thinking something like ṣūs.

3. Replacing the Phoenician alphabet with the Syriac alphabet after conversion makes sense, right?

Um I expect that Punic-speaking Christians would adopt Greek script, if they switched scripts at an early date, or Latin script, if they switched scripts at a later date. And why the hell would Syriac Christians go all the way out to the Canary islands instead of Latin Christians?

For the first, jeʃuaʕ > dʒiːzəs says hi. I think you're fine keeping the nativized ones.

Travis B. wrote:And why the hell would Syriac Christians go all the way out to the Canary islands instead of Latin Christians?

I don't know how reliable this is, but there seem to be a number of sources claiming that Syriac Christians did spread Christianity as far as Japan. If that's true, maybe the Canary Islands aren't that surprising.

I think that they might use a made-up relative of Tifinagh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh if they are isolated. Otherwise, they will use Latin or Arabic, depending on whether they trade more with Arabs/Berbers (who also had Christian communities) or with Roman Catholic countries.

Zaarin wrote:Are foreign place names--especially culturally significant ones--likely to be reborrowed or morphologically leveled if they become too unrecognizable? For context, I'm working on a Late Medieval form of Punic spoken in the Canary Islands by Syriac Christians. Vowel reduction is going to mangle certain place names. The one that prompted this question is this: Yerūsalêm > ʾirūslêm. Given the symbolic prominence of Jerusalem in Christian imagery, should I expect prominent foreign names like Jerusalem to be reborrowed from Syriac, or am I overthinking something that isn't really a problem?

Historically, Christians are very tolerant of sound changes mangling religious names. Look at French derivations of Biblical names, for instance.

Scholars might at any point insist on reborrowings, of course, as in the Renaissance a bunch of words in English, French, etc. were Latinized.

Also think about: how do people know that the word has changed pronunciation? Unless people reform their spelling every fifty years, sound changes just result in the orthography getting weirder. So your people wouldn't look at an Old Syriac word and have any special insight into how it was pronounced a thousand years ago.

Vijay wrote:

Travis B. wrote:And why the hell would Syriac Christians go all the way out to the Canary islands instead of Latin Christians?

I don't know how reliable this is, but there seem to be a number of sources claiming that Syriac Christians did spread Christianity as far as Japan. If that's true, maybe the Canary Islands aren't that surprising.

The thing is that Syriac Christianity spread east, not west, where it would have to go through both Greek Orthodox and Catholic areas.

Anyways, IIRC, the Christianity in Japan was Catholicism, spread there by the Portuguese.

Travis B. wrote:Anyways, IIRC, the Christianity in Japan was Catholicism, spread there by the Portuguese.

This is the official history, which these sources I mentioned challenge.

Vijay wrote:these sources

Where are they? I'd like to know more about the details.

There were lots of people belonging to minority sects in each province across the Roman Empire in the early centuries of Christianity. If the Canarians are from the early centuries of Rome, they could possibly be a Syrian Orthodox minority that sailed to the Canaries for religious freedom. In that case, however, they probably would lose contact with Syria and end up making their own Syriac church with liturgy in their own language.

Travis B. wrote:Um I expect that Punic-speaking Christians would adopt Greek script, if they switched scripts at an early date, or Latin script, if they switched scripts at a later date. And why the hell would Syriac Christians go all the way out to the Canary islands instead of Latin Christians?

Honestly, plot reasons. If it makes you feel better, there's a Roman Christian enclave in Lanzarote and northern Fuerteventura.

Vijay wrote:

Travis B. wrote:And why the hell would Syriac Christians go all the way out to the Canary islands instead of Latin Christians?

I don't know how reliable this is, but there seem to be a number of sources claiming that Syriac Christians did spread Christianity as far as Japan. If that's true, maybe the Canary Islands aren't that surprising.

And Coptic Christians beat Roman Christians to Ireland, though their evangelical efforts weren't exactly widely successful.

vokzhen wrote:For the first, jeʃuaʕ > dʒiːzəs says hi. I think you're fine keeping the nativized ones.

Good point.

mèþru wrote:I think that they might use a made-up relative of Tifinagh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh if they are isolated. Otherwise, they will use Latin or Arabic, depending on whether they trade more with Arabs/Berbers (who also had Christian communities) or with Roman Catholic countries.

They do trade with Arabic-speaking Muslims in Al-Andalus (or rather, the Emirate of Granada by the time my story takes place) and North Africa, but their chief trading partners would be Romance-speakers (especially Catalan and Occitan speakers) in the northern Mediterranean. They have a hostile relationship with Castile, however. I could keep Phoenician script--it's just that it happens to be my least favorite Semitic script.

zompist wrote:

Zaarin wrote:Are foreign place names--especially culturally significant ones--likely to be reborrowed or morphologically leveled if they become too unrecognizable? For context, I'm working on a Late Medieval form of Punic spoken in the Canary Islands by Syriac Christians. Vowel reduction is going to mangle certain place names. The one that prompted this question is this: Yerūsalêm > ʾirūslêm. Given the symbolic prominence of Jerusalem in Christian imagery, should I expect prominent foreign names like Jerusalem to be reborrowed from Syriac, or am I overthinking something that isn't really a problem?

Historically, Christians are very tolerant of sound changes mangling religious names. Look at French derivations of Biblical names, for instance.

Scholars might at any point insist on reborrowings, of course, as in the Renaissance a bunch of words in English, French, etc. were Latinized.

Also think about: how do people know that the word has changed pronunciation? Unless people reform their spelling every fifty years, sound changes just result in the orthography getting weirder. So your people wouldn't look at an Old Syriac word and have any special insight into how it was pronounced a thousand years ago.

True, and since my story takes place on the eve of the Renaissance I could always "reborrow" classical words later.

mèþru wrote:There were lots of people belonging to minority sects in each province across the Roman Empire in the early centuries of Christianity. If the Canarians are from the early centuries of Rome, they could possibly be a Syrian Orthodox minority that sailed to the Canaries for religious freedom. In that case, however, they probably would lose contact with Syria and end up making their own Syriac church with liturgy in their own language.

Yes, something like this. The Canarian colony was established in the late third century BC, and after the fall of Carthage it became a nominal colony of Rome, though the Romans never maintained more than an outpost for the purpose of collecting taxes and imposing tariffs and the Canarians continued to speak Punic (which consequently developed differently from Neo-Punic, including retaining its pharyngeals and emphatics). Later, in the first, second, and third centuries AD, Aramaic-speaking Syriac Christians came to the isles to escape persecution in Syria; over time, these Christians lost contact with the patriarch of Antioch and became their own patriarchate. Syriac remained the liturgical language, and a significant amount of Syriac loanwords found their way into the vernacular (one of my reasons for wanting an Aramaic substrate, given how fragmentary the Punic/Phoenician lexicon is, though I've also been mining Hebrew for cognates). Latin, of course, is the liturgical language in the Catholic principalities in Lanzarote and northern Fuerteventura.

With most of their neighbours / trade partners being in the Latin / Catholic sphere, one can probably also expect a lot of Latin loanwords.

svld wrote:

Vijay wrote:these sources

Where are they? I'd like to know more about the details.

You can find them pretty easily by just googling something like "Syriac Christianity Japan" or something similar. But for a few examples, this mentions it, and there's also:
http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/~remnant/keikyo.htm
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2001/0 ... BOOtNTN_0o
https://www.scribd.com/document/1110339 ... ese-Empire

Some of this at least seems to stem from a hypothesis proposed by Saeki Yoshiro in 1908. I'm not sure it holds up, though.

This map from Wikipedia also mentions the Koryuji Temple Crosses. Googling "Koryuji Temple Crosses" should give you some relevant results, too. See also the last sentence in this article.

Here's the stele in question:
http://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fo ... 045742.jpg

hwhatting wrote:With most of their neighbours / trade partners being in the Latin / Catholic sphere, one can probably also expect a lot of Latin loanwords.

Definitely. I'm still working on native vocabulary at the moment, but there will definitely be loanwords from Latin (both Vulgar and Medieval) and Romance languages.