Re: "Roumant", or whatever it may be called. Part V

En réponse à Elliott Lash <AL260@...>:

>
> When I read this I was a little shocked
> as well. Why would Roumant keep a form
> such as this seemingly without any other
> analogous forms. And anyway how did
> it become volle when the Latin was velle?
> I really like the form but it just doesn't seem
> at all plausible.
>
As I already explained, "volle" doesn't date back to the CL velle but from
volére through sound changes that seem to have happened only to a few verbs
(maybe a change of position of the stress is responsible for it...). It's just
there and very lively in "Roumant", just like savve: to know, no way to deny it.
And those are only two of the verbs that behave this way. There are a few more
(I would say a small dozen of them).

>
> Actually from what I've read
> "ne" isn't direclty from the Indo-European
> (an imposibility in fact), but instead its
> just a weakened form of "non" which came
> about in the Gallo-Romance period. The Latin
> "non" became Gallo-Romance "non" then Early
> Old French "nen" then became "ne" with loss of
> the nasalization in an unstressed syllable, an
> isolated change to be sure, but probably a real
> change none the less.
>
In fact, the unstressed "ne" date as back as Old French before the nasalisation
process. So there was no loss of nasalisation but simply a loss of final
consonnant, very common in French.