Re: proto-romance questions

At 22:20 -0500 14.12.1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>Latin stress was quite regular.  The stress falls on the penultimate
>(next-to-last) if that syllable is long, and on the antepenult
>(next-to-the-next-to-the-last) if the penult is short.
[snip]

>So, first conjugation was -a:re, 2nd -ere, 3rd -e:re, 4th -i:re, 1st,
>3rd, and 4th have long penults, therefore stressed on the ending, while
>2nd has a short penult, thus stress is moved back.
>
>But by proto-Romance time, vowel length had been lost.
But the stress remained where it had been, thus becoming distinctive.

>
>> as /S/ and /Z/ were originally allophones of /s/
>> and /z/, becoming contrastive by borrowing(?)
>
>Could happen, but you might want to make /S/ and /Z/ from /sj/ and /zj/,
>and perhaps other clusters.  Old Spanish /Z/, for instance, frequently
>came from /lj/, hence /filju/ -> /fiZo/ -> /fiSo/ -> /fixo/ -> /ixo/
>(order?)
Correct, but /f/ > /h/ somewhere along the line before disappearing.

>
>> affricates: /tS/ {kappa+iota / kappa+eta}
>
>Cool, so did Latin /ki/ become /tSi/?
>
>> nasals: m n {mu nu} Do many languages have a palatal m?
>
>Not many, but most of the Romance languages either do.
Nasal *m*? Surely yous mean nasal *n*?

Proto-Romance *mj (corresponding to Latin "mi"/"me" before vowels) remained
in most places, except Old French, where it became /ndZ/ > /Z/ (page 152 in
Hall 1976, for those who got it).  Palatal /nj/ -- symbolizing it like this
for simplicity's sake -- derived from "ni, ne, gn, mni/mne, nn, mn" (citing
Latin forms since Latin dictionaries are a lot easier to come by :-), altho
the last three didn't become /nj/ everywhere -- cf. "damnare" It. dannare,
Sp. da~nar, Ptg. danar (Fr. damner is a loan from Latin) with "somnium" It.
sogno /nj/, Fr. songe /nZ/, Prov. somne, Sp. sue~no, Ptg. sonho.  Note
"domina" Pr-Rmc domna, It. donna, Sp. do~na!


/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
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