Tartessic: Medieval Iberian Punic
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:06 pm
Historical Context
When the Second Punic War ended with a stalemate and the Treaty of Cannae, the Mediterranean was divided into Roman northeast and Carthaginian southwest, a state of affairs that would endure for the remainder of antiquity. Carthage controlled North Africa west of Egypt, southern and western Iberia, and the Atlantic isles of the Canaries and the Azores (at least nominally, though neither archipelago was heavily colonized by Carthage at this time). Rome would go on to take the remainder of Iberia and Western Europe, the Middle East south of Persia, and Egypt. The two powers would contend over Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica for the rest of the Classical Era, with Rome more successful than Carthage.
In the first few centuries after the birth of Christ, Aramaic-speaking Christians from the Levant fled to Carthage to escape Roman persecution, finding welcome and bringing with them their language, their script, and non-Chalcedonian Christianity. By the fourth century Carthage had embraced the Syriac Orthodox Church and replaced the Phoenician script with cursive ʾĒstrāngēlā. Many Syriac loanwords entered the Punic language at this time, especially in relation to theology and science.
As the Classical period drew to a close, Rome found herself overwhelmed by Germanic-speaking barbarians. These invaders never made it to North Africa, rebuffed by Carthaginian Iberia. The Visigoths had to settle for northern Spain. A few centuries later, however, Islamic invaders swept in from the east. Carthage at last fell—all except the province of Tartessia in Spain.
The picture of Medieval Spain is consequently very different than our own timeline. In the north and in the Pyrenees you have the Roman Catholic Romance-speaking kingdoms. In the Balearics you have the Çuènardoc (a topic for another post). In the southwest and Portugal you have the caliphate of al-Andalus. And in the south between the Pyrenees and al-Andalus you have the Duchy of Tartessia. This is the case at the present time, the Year of Our Lord 1480.
Linguistic Overview
Tartessic, deriving its name but little else from the ancient city-state of Tartessos, is a Northwest Semitic language descended from the Punic of Carthage. More conservative than the Neo-Punic of North Africa, the most characteristic features of Tartessic include pretonic vowel reduction followed by prosthesis (mabōʾ > məbōʾ > mbōʾ > ʾimbōʾ) and loss of “weak” initial syllables (ʾadōn > dōn), vowel loss of the pattern CVRVC > CVRC (baʿal > baʿl) and CVCVCV > CVCCV (lipanīm > lipnīm), and lenition of pre-consonantal /b/ > /w/ followed by diphthong collapse (ʿabd > ʿawd > ʿōd). Unlike other modern Semitic languages, it retains ejective emphatics, and unlike Neo-Punic it has not lost its laryngeals.
Phonology
(Orthography below is what I use for my notes: Tartessic is written in Syriac script natively.)
/m n̪/ <m n>
/pʰ b t̪ʰ d̪ kʰ g ʔ/ <p b t d k g ʾ>
/t̪ʼ kʼ t̪͡s̪ʼ/ <ṭ q ṣ>
/s̪ z̪ (ʃ) ħ ʕ h/ <s z (š) ḥ ʿ h>
/j w/ <y w>
/r̺/ <r>
/l̪/ <l>
/ɑ ɑː e eː i iː o oː u uː/ <a ā e ē i ī o ō u ū>
Allophony
/jj/ is pronounced [ʝʝ].
/z̪/ becomes [d̪͡z̪] before /r̺ l̪/.
/r̺/ becomes [r̪] adjacent a dental consonant.
/l̪/ becomes [ɫ̪] adjacent /ħ ʕ/.
/e o/ become [ə ɵ] in unstressed open syllables.
/e o/ become [ɛ ɔ] in unstressed closed syllables.
/ɑ/ becomes [ə] in unstressed open syllables except after /ʔ h ħ ʕ/; it becomes [ɐ] instead before /ʔ ħ ʕ/.
/ɑ(ː) u(ː)/ become [æ(ː) ʊ(ː)] after /ħ ʕ/.
An epenthetic vowel [ə] is inserted between two word-initial plosives.
Notes
/n̪ t̪ʰ d̪ t̪ʼ t̪͡s̪ʼ s̪ z̪ l̪/ are apical dental; /r̺/ is apical alveolar (except adjacent a dental consonant as noted above).
/pʰ t̪ʰ kʰ/ are distinctly aspirated in all positions, included after resonants and word-finally.
/ʃ/ occurs only in loanwords (mostly from Syriac but also from Arabic and Romance languages) and only in high-register speech: most Tartessians realize it as /s̪/ in everyday speech.
/w/ occurs word-initially only in the conjunction wi- and loanwords.
/eː oː/ are rare outside stressed syllables.
Orthography
Tartessic is written in Syriac script without vowel markers or matres lectiones, as was typical of ʾĒstrāngēlā at the time it was adopted for writing Punic. A Roman letter script, called the Bacchic mode, was developed about sixty years ago by a literate merchant named Biks bibBirrekbaʿl for ease of communicating with his Romance-speaking contacts, but it hasn’t caught on much outside the merchant community.
Vocabulary
The attested Punic vocabulary is somewhat small, roughly 800 words, and to make matters more complicated it is also rather skewed due to the nature of the inscriptions, largely made up of funerary and monumental inscriptions. To supplement this rather insufficient lexicon, I have trawled Punic’s close cousin Biblical Hebrew for cognates—though always favoring an attested Phoenician or Punic lemma where available. I have also selected a few loanwords from Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian, Akkadian, and Ancient Egyptian.
The most significant source of loanwords in Tartessic is Syriac, which provides words related to theology (Quddāš, “Eucharist”; maʿmodit, “baptism”), astronomy (Nūnē, “Pisces”; ḥerb, “comet”), alchemy (ḥert, “sulfuric acid”; tiggār, “mercury”), mathematics (ʿūb, “sine”), and grammar (higyān, “vowel”). Terms for modern inventions tend to come from Arabic (midpeʿ, “cannon”), Catalan (harqabus, “arquebus”), or other Romance languages (būssol, “compass,” ultimately from Italian probably via Occitan).
Cities within Tartessia bear a mixture of Punic names like Gader (Cadiz) and Qert-ḥadist (Cartagena), pre-Punic names like Ṭarṭes (Tartessos), Roman names like Sagūṭṭu (Saguntum), and so forth. The Tartessians themselves strongly favor traditional Punic names. While many theophoric names have been expunged, those referencing Baʿl have been syncretized with God, Milk with Christ the King, and Milkot with Mary Queen of Heaven. Others managed to slip by through obscurity (like Ḥaṣṣid, “Ṣid be gracious to me”). Greek and Aramaic names associated with the New Testament (like Luqa, “Luke,” or Bartūlmē, “Bartholomew”) or Syriac saints (Biks, “Bacchus”) are also popular. Romance and Germanic names are not unheard of but not particularly popular, being associated with Gotīm (“Goths”—Western European Catholics, especially Iberian Romance-speaking Catholics).
Sorry for the delay in posting this. I originally intended to include a moderate-length text sample, but that will have to come later as I've been busy lately.
When the Second Punic War ended with a stalemate and the Treaty of Cannae, the Mediterranean was divided into Roman northeast and Carthaginian southwest, a state of affairs that would endure for the remainder of antiquity. Carthage controlled North Africa west of Egypt, southern and western Iberia, and the Atlantic isles of the Canaries and the Azores (at least nominally, though neither archipelago was heavily colonized by Carthage at this time). Rome would go on to take the remainder of Iberia and Western Europe, the Middle East south of Persia, and Egypt. The two powers would contend over Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica for the rest of the Classical Era, with Rome more successful than Carthage.
In the first few centuries after the birth of Christ, Aramaic-speaking Christians from the Levant fled to Carthage to escape Roman persecution, finding welcome and bringing with them their language, their script, and non-Chalcedonian Christianity. By the fourth century Carthage had embraced the Syriac Orthodox Church and replaced the Phoenician script with cursive ʾĒstrāngēlā. Many Syriac loanwords entered the Punic language at this time, especially in relation to theology and science.
As the Classical period drew to a close, Rome found herself overwhelmed by Germanic-speaking barbarians. These invaders never made it to North Africa, rebuffed by Carthaginian Iberia. The Visigoths had to settle for northern Spain. A few centuries later, however, Islamic invaders swept in from the east. Carthage at last fell—all except the province of Tartessia in Spain.
The picture of Medieval Spain is consequently very different than our own timeline. In the north and in the Pyrenees you have the Roman Catholic Romance-speaking kingdoms. In the Balearics you have the Çuènardoc (a topic for another post). In the southwest and Portugal you have the caliphate of al-Andalus. And in the south between the Pyrenees and al-Andalus you have the Duchy of Tartessia. This is the case at the present time, the Year of Our Lord 1480.
Linguistic Overview
Tartessic, deriving its name but little else from the ancient city-state of Tartessos, is a Northwest Semitic language descended from the Punic of Carthage. More conservative than the Neo-Punic of North Africa, the most characteristic features of Tartessic include pretonic vowel reduction followed by prosthesis (mabōʾ > məbōʾ > mbōʾ > ʾimbōʾ) and loss of “weak” initial syllables (ʾadōn > dōn), vowel loss of the pattern CVRVC > CVRC (baʿal > baʿl) and CVCVCV > CVCCV (lipanīm > lipnīm), and lenition of pre-consonantal /b/ > /w/ followed by diphthong collapse (ʿabd > ʿawd > ʿōd). Unlike other modern Semitic languages, it retains ejective emphatics, and unlike Neo-Punic it has not lost its laryngeals.
Phonology
(Orthography below is what I use for my notes: Tartessic is written in Syriac script natively.)
/m n̪/ <m n>
/pʰ b t̪ʰ d̪ kʰ g ʔ/ <p b t d k g ʾ>
/t̪ʼ kʼ t̪͡s̪ʼ/ <ṭ q ṣ>
/s̪ z̪ (ʃ) ħ ʕ h/ <s z (š) ḥ ʿ h>
/j w/ <y w>
/r̺/ <r>
/l̪/ <l>
/ɑ ɑː e eː i iː o oː u uː/ <a ā e ē i ī o ō u ū>
Allophony
/jj/ is pronounced [ʝʝ].
/z̪/ becomes [d̪͡z̪] before /r̺ l̪/.
/r̺/ becomes [r̪] adjacent a dental consonant.
/l̪/ becomes [ɫ̪] adjacent /ħ ʕ/.
/e o/ become [ə ɵ] in unstressed open syllables.
/e o/ become [ɛ ɔ] in unstressed closed syllables.
/ɑ/ becomes [ə] in unstressed open syllables except after /ʔ h ħ ʕ/; it becomes [ɐ] instead before /ʔ ħ ʕ/.
/ɑ(ː) u(ː)/ become [æ(ː) ʊ(ː)] after /ħ ʕ/.
An epenthetic vowel [ə] is inserted between two word-initial plosives.
Notes
/n̪ t̪ʰ d̪ t̪ʼ t̪͡s̪ʼ s̪ z̪ l̪/ are apical dental; /r̺/ is apical alveolar (except adjacent a dental consonant as noted above).
/pʰ t̪ʰ kʰ/ are distinctly aspirated in all positions, included after resonants and word-finally.
/ʃ/ occurs only in loanwords (mostly from Syriac but also from Arabic and Romance languages) and only in high-register speech: most Tartessians realize it as /s̪/ in everyday speech.
/w/ occurs word-initially only in the conjunction wi- and loanwords.
/eː oː/ are rare outside stressed syllables.
Orthography
Tartessic is written in Syriac script without vowel markers or matres lectiones, as was typical of ʾĒstrāngēlā at the time it was adopted for writing Punic. A Roman letter script, called the Bacchic mode, was developed about sixty years ago by a literate merchant named Biks bibBirrekbaʿl for ease of communicating with his Romance-speaking contacts, but it hasn’t caught on much outside the merchant community.
Vocabulary
The attested Punic vocabulary is somewhat small, roughly 800 words, and to make matters more complicated it is also rather skewed due to the nature of the inscriptions, largely made up of funerary and monumental inscriptions. To supplement this rather insufficient lexicon, I have trawled Punic’s close cousin Biblical Hebrew for cognates—though always favoring an attested Phoenician or Punic lemma where available. I have also selected a few loanwords from Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian, Akkadian, and Ancient Egyptian.
The most significant source of loanwords in Tartessic is Syriac, which provides words related to theology (Quddāš, “Eucharist”; maʿmodit, “baptism”), astronomy (Nūnē, “Pisces”; ḥerb, “comet”), alchemy (ḥert, “sulfuric acid”; tiggār, “mercury”), mathematics (ʿūb, “sine”), and grammar (higyān, “vowel”). Terms for modern inventions tend to come from Arabic (midpeʿ, “cannon”), Catalan (harqabus, “arquebus”), or other Romance languages (būssol, “compass,” ultimately from Italian probably via Occitan).
Cities within Tartessia bear a mixture of Punic names like Gader (Cadiz) and Qert-ḥadist (Cartagena), pre-Punic names like Ṭarṭes (Tartessos), Roman names like Sagūṭṭu (Saguntum), and so forth. The Tartessians themselves strongly favor traditional Punic names. While many theophoric names have been expunged, those referencing Baʿl have been syncretized with God, Milk with Christ the King, and Milkot with Mary Queen of Heaven. Others managed to slip by through obscurity (like Ḥaṣṣid, “Ṣid be gracious to me”). Greek and Aramaic names associated with the New Testament (like Luqa, “Luke,” or Bartūlmē, “Bartholomew”) or Syriac saints (Biks, “Bacchus”) are also popular. Romance and Germanic names are not unheard of but not particularly popular, being associated with Gotīm (“Goths”—Western European Catholics, especially Iberian Romance-speaking Catholics).
Sorry for the delay in posting this. I originally intended to include a moderate-length text sample, but that will have to come later as I've been busy lately.
