R: Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.

John Cowan wrote:

> Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
> > >In other
> > >words, you have to assume that the nominative plural survived as in
Italian,
> > >not the accusitive pl. /-o:s/ as in Spanish, French etc.
> >
> > Hang on - the nominative _did_ survive in Old French, cf.
> >            SINGULAR     PLURAL
> > Nominative:  murs        mur
> >    Oblique:  mur         murs
>
> But then it died almost without a trace, except for special cases like
pretre
> < PRESBYTER and on < HOMO.
>
> Anyway, it turns out that the Italian plural endings aren't really from
the
> nom. either, it just looks that way.  Consider adj. "magnifico", fem. pl.
> "magnifiche" /-ke/.  If this were from MAGNIFICAE, it would have been
> "magnifice" /-tSe/; instead, it is from MAGNIFICAS, with loss of "-s".
>
I've just read Rohlfs's pages about the matter (in 'Historische Grammatik
der Italienischen Sprache und ihrer Mundarten'), and he doens not believe
this theory. Indeed we'd have, for exemple:

LUPU(M)    >    lupo
LUPO:S    >    lupi

And here we do agree. But we have, also:

AMAMUS    >    amiamo

But the ending -us (where the u is breve) should give the same reflex -o:s
gives (short u and long o merged). It isn't so, and, this way, we have
demonstrated that the plural ending is directly coming down from Latin. It
is true that palatalisation seldom appears in ending vowel+/s/ combinations
(nos > noi; vos > voi; habes > *has > hai; vadis > *vas > vai...), but in
monosyllabic words only. Then the fact that the plural of magnifica is
magnifiche can be explained with analogy: the plural of 'amico', in some old
texts, was 'amichi' /amiki/ as well, and the palatalisation indeed happens
in educated words only (graeco-latin -ico adjectives and so on).

Luca