Re: proto-romance questions

"J. Barefoot" wrote:
> Do the other verb classes have (semi-)regular stress like this?
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.

A syllable is long if it contains a long vowel or diphthong, or if it
contains a short vowel followed by two or more consonants (not a blend,
like bl), x counting as a double consonant (ks).

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.

> 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?)

> 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.

--
"Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." -
anonymous
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