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

From:Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...>
Date:Monday, December 4, 2000, 3:19
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