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

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 08:03:20PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> Welsh day-names are also derived from British Vulgar Latin, and you may be
> interested to know them (the second word is genitival in function):
> dydd Sul (sundat)
> dydd Llun
> dydd Mawrth
> dydd Mercher
> dydd Iau
> dydd Gwener
> dydd Sadwrn
Is <dydd> a native Welsh word, or is it also from Latin?

> At 11:56 am +0100 27/11/00, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >(French dimanche, Italian
> >domenica, Romanian dominica, Catalan diumenge, Occitan dimenge) or domínicus
> >(Spanish and Portuguese Domingo).
>
> VL /do'mEnko(s)/
Of course in Spanish and Portuguese the -c- underwent voicing, probably
before the syncope of the preceding -i-; the remaining -i- is strange too in
that it should have been *-e- (*domengo).

> >so it sounds likely to me. Even
> >the strange /i/ vowel in dimanche and dimenge is explained through the Catalan
> >diumenge (a sound change /o/ -> /ju/ doesn't sound unreasonable to me).
>
> It is unreasonable, however.  What has happened in these languages is that
> the initial, pretonic syllable has been reformed under the influence of di-
> <-- (dies).
My hypothesis was that diumenge < *diomenga < *di(es) domenica, with the
initial d of *domenica dropping because of its intervocalic position. This
happens a lot in Spanish and French, but I'm not so sure about Catalan or
Occitan.

> The Romans borrowed the word _sabbatum_ not directly from Hebrew but
> indirectly via Greek _sabbaton_.  Now /bb/ is anomalous in Greek, and there
> was clearly a popular by form /sambaton/ which would - and did - give
> popular Latin *sambato --> *sambto  --> *sambdo.
Was beta fricative by that point in Greek? If so, that would give a good
reason to use -mp- [mb] for the sound (as discussed earlier). What happened
with the words borrowed from Aramaic abba (such as abbot, abbey, and abbess
in English)?

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo