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Melroch 'Aestan wrote: > Will they *need* two letters for /g/? IMHO they could use only qaaf like the Mozarabs did *here*, unless the North African sound change was posterior to the introduction of Arabic script to Adjami which already had /g/. Alternatively if /g/ already had two allophones [g] and [G] they might have made do with only ghayn! Well, I'm still thinking over the thing, but for now the reasoning is like this: - ghayn remains /R/, and is used both for Arabic /R/ and IR (Ibero-Romance) intervocal geminated /r/ as in Portuguese, so Aj. 'dog' is /peRo/ - pa ya g'ayn z'amma; - when Arabic script was introduced to Ajami, qaf in Arabic words was /G\/, and IR words only started /k/ > /g/ transition (in fact, *here* intervocal voicing of stops did not occur in Mozarabic at all), so /g/ was written as kaf, and the stroke diacritic was added later when it became necessary to distinguish the sounds; later /G\/ > /g/, but spelling difference remains, just as between, e.g. between ta, ta-h'afifo (/T/ in Arabic) and ta-tagilo (/t_?\/ or how do you denote those emphatics???) that all merged into /t/. > Not so in Raamaniyaan of course, where /g/ and /G/ (or rather /R/) contrast after vowels. The same in Ajami. > The only modification is nyaaf/gnaaf/ñaaf (gaaf with three dots above, U+06b4) since I don't like the idea of nun+ye being tri-ambiguous between _ny, ni, nVy_. Besides /J/ is the only phoneme which R. doesn't share with Farsi; it felt strange with a Romance language, however remote, lacking /J/! :) In Ajami /J/ has clearly decomposed into /n/+/j/ as in Ladino > Also there is the strange origin of /Z/ in palatalized /r_j/ -- I like that mapping since it is found in my native lect of Swedish, and AFAIK only Polish has something similar. In Ajami /Z/ occurs only in IR layer where it comes from /L/, e.g. /fiZo/ 'son'. OTOH, /dZ/ started being pronounced as [Z] in ca. 18th c. AD, but the phonemic difference remains: /dZ/ is lunar, /Z/ is solar: _el-dZivo_ [@l"Zi:Bo] 'the pocket', but _eZ-Zano_ [@"Z:A:no] 'the floor'. -- Yitzik