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Salaam everyone! I believe most of you will already know me from CONLANG and East Asian Conlangs, so I doubt any personal introduction is necessary. I would like to make a brief intro to an Arabic-based conlang idea I have and solicit suggestions from my friends on the list. For years now I've kicked around the idea of an Arabic-based creole. Contact languages are perhaps my biggest interest in linguistics; this and my love of the Mid East and Arabic have naturally been contributing factors. Maltese has always been a fascination of mine, and I guess we can look at it as a kind of Arabic language-in-contact. I've recently found some information about Arabic-based creoles like Nubi, and the non-p/c mixed language Kormatiki Arabic. This was all just too much inspiration, so I decided to start in what little bit of free time I have to put together some of the resources I would need. I have no conculture or conhistory to propose, but to give some kind of boundary to the project I'm imagining a pan-Mediterranean (mostly Romance and Greek) substratial environment with a mostly Maghrebi Arabic superstrate. Basically like Maltese, you say? Well, kinda... My Yet Un-named Arabic Creole (YUnAC) is much more restructured (simplified, if you will). I guess we could say that unlike Maltese, the Romance influence is mostly in the restructuring of the grammar and the phonology, while the vocabulary should remain mostly Arabic. As for grammar, I'm looking first for examples of simplification in Arabic (and Maltese) from actual Arabic dialects and creoles. I'll get more in to this in a future post when I've actually worked more on that. But Kormatiki Arabic has been a big inspiration here. As for phonology, I'm influenced a lot by the way Arabic words have been changed in languages like Farsi, Turkish or Swahili, but I'm really going for a kind of "Maltese flavoured Moroccan." This leads me to my request for suggestions. YUnAC will not have [q], so I need to decide what its reflex will be. Yemeni and Sudanese have and Andalusian Arabic had a delicious precedent in [q] > [g]. I think some Algerian dialects do this as well, but I don't know about Morocco. Maltese, I believe, turns [q] > [?]. Turkish and Swahili seem to turn it to [k]; Indonesian, as near as I can tell, turns it to [k] with front vowels being pulled to back vowels. I was tempted very much to turn [q] in to [k] with front vowels becoming back vowels; thus a pair like "heart" vs. "dog" would be: kolb "heart" kalb "dog" But the [q] > [g] option is tempting as well, especially as it actually occurs in Arabic dialects. I would be even more tempted by it if it happens in Morocco. Would this cause front vowels to become back vowels as well or should I leave them alone? I think one of my prejudices against [q] > [g] is the fact that, to me, [q] sounds more like a [k] and the non-Semitic languages that have borrowed from Arabic seem to agree. Any suggestions welcome! Sorry if it's not entirely clear; I'm suffering from a sinus infection. :) Cheers, Eamon