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

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, November 20, 2000, 14:29
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.