Re: more help, this time on sound change

En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> > An example is the verb "aimer":
> > to love, stem "aim-" /Em/ vs. the corresponding noun "amour": love,
> stem "am-
> > " /am/.
>
>
> Actually this one is because "amour" is a borrowing,
Well, indeed it's a borrowing from Occitan or another language of oc, but my
point remains since the Northern cognate (heard here and there)
is 'ameur' /a'm9R/ which also has the stem 'am-' (in fact, the verb used to
be 'amer', with the stem 'aim-' in the present tense forms stressed on the
stem, 'am-' being restricted to the forms stressed on the ending. Analogy
regularized that by taking the first person present - using 'aim-' - as the
basic form - which can be understood since at that time this form didn't have a
distinctive ending anymore and became thus considered as the stem form - and
regularised all forms based on that. The same happened to many verbs - only a
few remain which still show alternations in the stem - regularising a lot the
conjugations, but in many cases obscuring the relations between verbs and other
words using originally the same root).

>
> Sound change operates regularly to create irregularities;
> analogy operates irregularly to create regularities.
>
Should have remembered this sentence :((( .

Christophe.

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