Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Pequeno (was Re: Pilovese in the Romance Language Family)

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Friday, April 4, 2008, 15:25
Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Apr 3, 2008, at 1:57 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote: >>You may have noticed that I avoided stating a personal opinion, but I >>actually believe there must have been a root *pik- in some substrate >>language **in Italy** which got picked up into Vulgar Latin in two >>different dialect forms */pikkin/ and */pik;k;in/, plus possibly an >>unsuffixed form */pikk/ which then spread across the empire with VL >>itself. > >I think it's possible that the variation tt ~ kk ~ kk; ~ ts might have >come from "childish" pronunciations of the word; Grandgent's _Introduction >to Vulgar Latin_ has the same hypothesis to the variation -iclus ~ -ittus >~ -iccus. The semantics of those forms would seem to make them apt to be >said in baby talk. >
Plus, there's an onomatopoetic _tendency_ in many languages to use [i] to express smallness ~high pitch ~nearness etc. vs. [a, u] for the opposites. "Pauc-" clearly violates that, and it might not be surprising if in nursery speech it got revised to [pik-], then added the various diminutive suffixes. IIRC there's Spanish "pico" 'little bit' as in "son las tres y pico" 'it's a little after three (o'clock)'. I don't recall if Italian has it. The only oddity about "pequeño" would be the /ñ/. From *-nn- ? And a question: what does "k;" represent in BPJ's "pik;k;in-"? Some new addition to CXS?

Reply

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>