Re: USAGE: Yet another few questions about Welsh.
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, July 8, 2004, 5:27 |
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On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 05:27 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> At 22:07 7/6/2004, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>> I've read of this "weakening"/lenition process in spoken Latin (before
>> the Romance diversification, therefore common to all Romance languages)
>
> Not Rumanian, IIRC.
That's what I thought (or at least it worked out differently there). That'
s why I restricted my remarks to 'western VL'. But my knowledge of eastern
Romance is patchy; I'm more familiar with western Romance.
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On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 09:07 , Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]
> I've read of this "weakening"/lenition process in spoken Latin (before
> the Romance diversification, therefore common to all Romance languages)
> but wasn't aware that it had happened in other languages as well. The
> Welsh process does look similar . . .
..not just Welsh, but the Brittonic languages generally. But I'm fairly
certain that similar sound shifts are attested in other language groups
(tho I confess none come readily to mind at the moment).
> ss I understand it, the Latin
> version went something like this (in intervocalic position):
>
> 1. preexisting voiced fricatives, if any, disappeared
None in old Brittonic AFAIK.
> 2. voiced stops became voiced fricatives
> 3. voiceless stops became voiced stops
Yep - just as in Brittonic.
> 4. geminate voiceless stops became simple voiceless stops.
There is, however, a difference here. Geminate voiceless plosives/stops
became voiceless fricatives, e.g. catto- (cat) --> Welsh: cath, Cornish:
kath, Breton: kazh /kaz/ or /kah/ (depending on dialect <-- */kaT/);
Britto:nica (British [language])--> Welsh: Brythoneg, Cornish: Brithonek,
Breton: Brezhoneg.
[snip]
> In some cases these developments happened in parallel, but in other
> cases in series, so that sometimes a [g] that was already the result of
> lenition from [k] was subject to further lenition to [G].
Cf. Old French:
p --> b --> B --> v capra --> chievre ("goat" - mod Fr. chèvre)
t --> d --> D --> 'zero' vita --> vie ("life")
k --> g --> G --> 'zero' securu- --> seur ("sure" - mod. sûr)
The Brittonic langs stopped at the voicing stage :)
Ray
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