Re: sound changes in proto-romance/vulgar latin

Barry Garcia wrote:
"I read an article at britannica.com about the romance languages. It
touched a decent amount on the sound changes from vulgar latin to the
romance languages, but really didnt go into detail (it touched on the
changes that happened to intervocalic p and t). I'm mostly interested in
the changes to the vowels. What were some of the other sound changes? If
it's too much to post here, are there any books I can check out to read
about this, or websites to visit?"

     The sound changes which occurred in the vowels are not very
complicated.  First of all, length was lost; long e and short i merge; long
o and short u merge as well; as a result of all of these mergers, there was
a reorganization of vowel quality, with long vowels becoming closed and
short vowels becoming open, for the most part.  So short u and long o merge
to become closed o, short i and long e merge to become closed e.
     Long a and short a merge to become a single phoneme.  The diphthongs
also disappeared; eu dropped out of use, ae became open e and oe became
closed e.  This happened very early in the history of Vulgar
Latin/Proto-Romance.  The diphthong au, on the other hand, was a bit more
hardy; it survives in Old Occitan and also Romanian.
     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!).
     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?"
series but it has grown a bit since then and has been translated into
several languages.  I find it extremely readable.  If you want, send me a
note and I'll dig up the ordering info for you (I ordered it over the
Internet from the Penn State press; I don't know if it's available through
Amazon.com).

-Chollie
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