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Re: A funny linguistic subway experience + some questions about nouns of days and months

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 29, 2000, 22:01
En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> > > >Interesting that they kept the Sun and Saturn for Sunday and Saturday. > >Influence > >>from English? > > No - just that they were taken into British at an early date before the > Church managed to get Sabbath and the Lord's day widely accepted. The > Church did, of course, try to get all the pagan deity names dropped and > have the days numbered as in Greek. But it succeeded to do this only in > Portuguese. >
Oh, that's the reason why it's so in Portuguese. I'm wondering if I shouldn't do that for the official day-names in "Roumant" too, keeping the pagan forms for the popular names... [snip]
> > > >That would explain then the presence of the /m/ in French, But not in > Romanian > >(which had sambata, as well as octombrie for October). > > It might well explain _sambata_. Romania is not far from the Greek > speaking world and it falls within the Eastern Orthodox area. > > I would guess that the -m- in _octombrie_ is simply by analogy with: > septembrie, noembrie [which looks very much influenced by Greek: > noémvrios], decembrie. >
True, I thought of that, but only after I hit the "send" button. I'm thinking of having the same analogy in "Roumant".
> > > >So the German /R/ appeared from influence from French? Then where does > it come > >>from in French? > > In the salons of 18th century Paris. >
Strange... So they suddenly decided to gargle instead of tapping their tongues? :)))
> > >I thought the contrary was what happened (to explain why French > >is the only Romance language which didn't keep the trilled apical /r/). > > The French were always the most innovative of the Romance nations :) >
:))) Thanks :) .
> I think the trilled apical /r/ can still be heard in some rural areas of > France, particularly the south. And (some forms of) Portuguese now uses > the uvular [R] for the former -rr- (the strongly trilled /r/ of > Spanish), > while -r- is still the flap or slight trill used also in Spanish. >
I don't know for Portuguese, but it's true that the trilled /r/ is the strongest feature of the Southern "accents" of French. Christophe.