Re: sound changes in proto-romance/vulgar latin

On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Leo Caesius wrote:

>     These mergers did not occur throughout the Romance area.  In Sardinia,
>vowel quality remained as it was all along, even though length was lost; in
>Romania, the front vowels merged, but the back vowels retained their
>identity.  Finally, in Sicily, in stressed syllables, long i, short i, and
>long e have all merged to i; long u, short u, and long o have merged as u
>(e.g. Sic. "niputi" from Lat. "nepotem").  The preponderance of the three
>vowels a, i, and u in the Sicilian system has led some pseudo-scholars to
>speculate that Sicilian is a Semitic language (I kid you not!).
It's worth noting that African Latin seems to be the most conservative
in it's vowels, since it retains all 5 vowels but does lose length.

>     I'm taking all of this from Jozsef Herman's book on "Vulgar Latin,"
>which was published this year.  It was originally part of the "Que sais je?"
Will look into this.

>-Chollie