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

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?

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