Re: Question about Latin E and Slavic yat'

Jan van Steenbergen wrote:

> During the last few weeks, I have been working on Wenedyk quite
> intensively. ....
> Two things about this vowel are bothering me.
>
> 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]. Until now, I have been assuming that long E
> and long I diphthongised to [iE], thus giving SE: > *sje > sze. But
> I'm slowly finding out that in all Romance languages except
> Portuguese diphthongisation occurred rather in the short version,
> [E].
Unless I'm mistaken, long e diphthongized in certain envs. in French-- the
pronouns me/te/se, words like lege-, rege-, credere, debere etc.
(C-loss may have something to do with those; I don't recall the rules
offhand.)

Anyhow, I don't see any particular reason why long or tense vowels couldn't
undergo breaking (or diphthongization); they did in German, Dutch and
English after all.

>Now here's my question: when did this diphthongisation of [E]
> take place in Romance?
It must have been common, since it affects Romanian as well as the western
languages

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?
Substratum perhaps? The universal panacea for perplexed linguists :-)))
(snip the _yat_ discussion; out of my bailiwick)

> If my suspicions are true, I've been working with an [E] > [e] / [e]
> > [&] schedule, which I really don't think can hold any longer.
>
It seems a little contradictory (to me) that low vowels would raise, while
high vowels would lower.

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