Re: Question about Latin E and Slavic yat'

 --- Ray Brown skrzypszy:

> > Until now, I have been assuming that long E and long I
> > diphthongised to [iE], thus giving SE: > *sje > sze.
>
> Wrong.
>
> Long-i did not diphthongize in any variety of Romance.
I've been looking at Romanian, and what I found is that T, D, S
becames /ts/, /z/ and /S/ before short E and long I. If the process
is the same as in Slavic (where the same thing happens), then
something like /ti/ > /tii/ > /tji/ > /tsi/ must have been at work.

I would be lying if I said that I copied this development from
Romanian, but at least I was happy to find it confirmed there.

> Long-e (and short-i which in western Romance fell together with the
> old long-e) diphthongized when stressed in north Gaul, thus _se_
> became *sej --> *sEj --> sOj (spelled _soi_ in Old French).
While that is indeed true in all living Romance languages, in the
case of Wenedyk (and Slvanjec; my efforts have to a certain degree
been coordinated with Benct's) I have mapped short I and U to the
Slavic yers instead, which in my opinion is a reasonable (and for a
project like ours inevitable) thing to do. An admittedly weak
justification is the fact that the Slavo-Romance languages are
neither East nor West Romance, but constitute a separate subgroup in
IB.

> In all the romance langs, /O/ and /E/, which was the VL development
> of Classical short-o and short-e (VL did not have phonemic long &
> short vowels) became _rising diphthongs_ when in unblocked stressed
> syllables.
Except in Portugese, as far as I have understood.

>   In unstressed syllables there was no diphthongization.
True, I forgot to mention that. That is also true in Wenedyk, by the
way.

> > [E]. Now here's my question: when did this diphthongisation of
> > [E] take place in Romance?
>
> In the stressed  unblocked syllables in VL.
Thanks. But my question was worded badly. By "when" I actually meant:
in which century, more or less?

> > And, how likely would it be that it did not happen in the Vulgar
> > Latin that would later develop into Wenedyk (and Slvanjec, for
> > that matter), but that instead [e] were diphthongised?
>
> Not likely IMO. There would have be strong influences from native
> langs of the area and also reasons why it was not subject to
> contact with the wider VL world of merchants & legionaries.
Ah, but those have already been taken care of! :)

> > The second problem is the mapping to the Common Slavic yat' (e^].
> > For some reason, I have always mapped Latin long E and OE to the
> > yat', and short E and AE to the Slavic E. Intuititively, that
> > works well in general, but I'm having some doubts about
> > plausibility.
>
> So am I - I would have thought it would have been the other way
> round - but I'm no Slavic expert.
Neither am I. As it turned out, nobody knows precisely what the
Ancient Slavic yat' sounded like. In West Slavic is was probably
something like [&:], possibly also [j&:]. But then, Common Slavic is
also a flexible thing, encompassing quite a lot of centuries. The
fact that in Czech it becomes [i], while in Polish it becomes [E]
([a] before a hard dental consonant) isn't particularly helpful
either.

> The Romance lang that actually did come under Slavic influence is
> Romanian. Maybe you need to track down more specific info on the
> development of Romanian.
I must admit that I have neglected Romanian far too much in the
beginning, focussing on Classical Latin and (Western) Romance
instead. I've worked quite a lot with Peter Boyd-Bowman's "From Latin
to Romance in Sound Charts", which is a really nice work, but
unfortunately deals only with the "big four" (French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian).

Changing 3000 words and a reasonably-sized corpus is not an easy
task. I would undoubtedly have done a few things differently if I had
known everything I know now from the beginning. At this stage,
however, I'll rather limit myself to changing those things which are
impossible or utterly implausible.

Thank you for replying.

Jan

=====
"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed
room with a mosquito."

Relay 10: http://steen.free.fr/relay10/


	
	
		
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