Re: Question about Latin E and Slavic yat'

On Sunday, October 31, 2004, at 08:15 , Jan van Steenbergen wrote:

[snip]
> First of all, diphthongisation. According to my books, Latin long E
> and OE were pronounced [e] in Vulgar Latin, while Latin short E and
> AE were pronounced [E].
Correct.

> 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.

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).

> But
> I'm slowly finding out that in all Romance languages except
> Portuguese diphthongisation occurred rather in the short version,
Portuguese did not retain the simple Latin vowels; it _monophthongized_
diphthongs that had developed in western Romance and medieval Iberian
Romance.

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.
In some areas, e.g. the Iberian peninsular, they also became rising
diphthongs in blocked syllables; but this did not happen in Gaul or Italy.
  In unstressed syllables there was no diphthongization.

> [E]. Now here's my question: when did this diphthongisation of [E]
> take place in Romance?
In the stressed  unblocked syllables in VL.

> 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.

>
> 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.

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.

Ray
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