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

At 11:56 am +0100 27/11/00, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>I first want to share with you an interesting experience I had in the
>subway two days ago:
[snip - interesting, but I can't throw any light on the dialect]

[...]

>I'm also wondering how likely it would be that the Latin month names
>(which were
>originally adjectives) be used with "mens":
_mensis_ /me:sis/, masc., actually.
_mens_ /me:s/ is a _feminine_ noun meaning "mind"   :)

>month so consistently that evolution
>would collapse the whole phrase into one word, as it happened with days
>names in
>French, Italian, Occitan and Catalan (where Lunae/Lunas dies, dies Lunae/Lunas
Yes, 'dies' survived with day-names because the other word was (mostly) a
genitive case: lunae dies, martis dies etc.  Only Spanish AFAIK dropt the
'dies', retaining just forms derived from the gentive.

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

The month names are a mix of Vulgar Latin derived forms and native
Brittonic derived names.  But March has: mis Mawrth (month of Mars) where
'mis' is needed to distinguish it from 'dydd Mawrth'.

I guess that if 'Martius' and 'Martis' got confused because of attrition of
endings, the same process could happen in Roumant.  It could then extend by
analogy to other month names that are more obviously named after a deity,
e.g. Juno's month, Julius' month (he was deified), Augustus' month.  But
I'm not sure that I can realistically envisage the use of 'mensis'.

[...]
>weekend days (Saturday and Sunday) give me quite a few troubles. As for
>Sunday,
>All the forms seem to come from either domínica
VL /do'mEnka/ (or in Italy & the east: /do'mEnIika/)

>(French dimanche, Italian
>domenica, Romanian dominica, Catalan diumenge, Occitan dimenge) or domínicus
>(Spanish and Portuguese Domingo).
VL /do'mEnko(s)/

>Am I right?
Spot on   :)

>In Medieval (Christian) Latin, "dies" could be masculine as well as feminine,
In Classical (pagan) Latin, to be precise.

The 'rule' is that _dies_ is normally masculine, but it may be feminine in
the singular only if it refers to a specfic day.


>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).

>As for
>Saturday, Spanish and Portuguese sábado and Italian sabato seem to derive from
>Medieval Latin sáb(b)atum: S(h)abbat (I'm not quite sure of the spelling in
>English).
_sabbath_ - and this quite correct; tho again it should be noted that
'sabbatum' is found in Classical Latin.

And it's worth noting a degree of learned influence here.  The Vl would be
*sabto or *sambto.

>Romanian sambata, Catalan and Occitan dissabte seem to derive from
>(dies) sábbata (but I thought sábbatum was a noun, so I would have guessed
>(dies) sábbati instead).
Yes, and Occitan _dissabte_ is surely from _dies sabata.

>Then comes the French form samedi /sam'di/. It seems
>completely off this system. Does it derive from, say, sábbata dies,
Yes.

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.

The French is from *sambti die.

>or does it have another origin?
No.

>When I've seen the Romanian form, I've realized that a
>change /b/ -> /m/ is not unlikely,
It's /bb/ --> /mb/

>but I would have thought that it would be
>regular, while I cannot find it anywhere else in French.
No, you have to look in popular Hellenistic Greek - see above.
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At 3:08 pm +0100 27/11/00, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>:
[....]
>> I don't have any idea, but isn't Samstag a German word for Saturday?
>>
>
>Yes, John Cowan already pointed that out. Still, it doesn't give me any clue
>where the French form comes from.
No, it wouldn't, since the German form is borrowed from French  :)

The 'pure' German for "Saturday" is _Sonnabend_ which is still, I
understand, the normal word in northen Germany.  The southern 'Samstag' is
a deliberate adaptation of from the French 'samedi' when all things French
were imitated by those who wanted to appear fashionable and wordly-wise.
Presumably it appeared at the same time that the fashionable southerners
started imitating the French uvular /R/ which has now, by and large I
believe, replaced the older trilled apical /r/.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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