Re: proto-romance questions

At 11:50 am +0100 16/12/99, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 21:54 -0600 15.12.1999, J. Barefoot wrote:
>>
>>No, I meant "m".
>>
>>As in dormi:'re > dormie'ra >(?) /dorm~e'ra/
>
>Ah, but that doesn't count as a single palatalized phoneme, but as /m+j/.
>You may of course have distinctive palatalization for all consonants in
>*your* Rmc lang, if you want to! :-)  My con-Rmc lang Akhelin has, because
>Rumanian has.  Not quite consistent, since Rumanian palatalization probably
>is an areal influence from Slavic,
I don't think there can be any doubt about Romanian palatalization being of
Slavic influence, extending the partial palatalization of the other Romance
langs so that, as you say, all consonants have a 'hard' & 'soft'
pronunciation a la Slav.

But an isolated palatalized /m/ would be unique in the Romancelangs.  In
fact in the western Romancelangs the palatalization goes in forms like
'dormio' & 'dormiunt'.  The vulgar Latin pronunciation was /'dOrmo/ and
/'dOrmun/, cf. Italian 'dormo', 'dormono'.  In the Iberian peninsular the
3rd person plural -un(t) was replaced by the -en(t) of the 2nd conj. so we
have: duermo, duermen - but the 'i' has gone in both forms.

The -i- must have gone at an early date, since not even Romanian shows any
palatalization here; both /'dOrmo/ and /'dOrmun/ have become just 'dorm'.

Ray.






and my lang i supposed to be
>Persian-influenced.  Akhelin does however have an *E > /ja/ change, so I
>thought that would make distinctive palatalization likely to arise.  The
>French-inspired Romanization of Akhelin mostly indicates palatalization of
>a consonant by using different graphemes for the following vowel:
>
>PHONEME        CV    CjV
>
>/i/ < i:       --    i
>/e/ < i, e:    --    /e
>/@/ < a, e, o  e     \e [&]
>/u/ < u:       ou    you
>/o/ < u, o:    o     u [y]
>/a/ < a:       a     ya
>
>The Arabic-based orthography of Akhelin has a dotless Ye for /i/, a dotless
>Ye with Hamze for /e/ and [&], an optional Hamze or nothing for /@/ and
>/o/, Waw for /u/ and Alif for /a/.
>
>
>/BP
>
> B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~__
>            Anant' avanaute quettalmar!               \ \
>   __  ____ ____    _____________  ___ __   __ __     / /
>   \ \/___ \\__ \  /___  _____/\ \\__ \\ \  \ \\ \   / /
>   / /   / /  /  \    / /Melroch\ \_/ // /  / // /  / /
>  / /___/ /_ / /\ \  / /Melarocco\_  // /__/ // /__/ /
> /_________//_/  \_\/ /Eowine__   / / \___/\_\\___/\_\
>I neer Pityancalimeo\ \_____/ /ar/ /_atar Mercasso naan
>~~~~~~~~~Cuinondil~~~\_______/~~~\__/~~~Noolendur~~~~~~
>|| Lenda lenda pellalenda pellatellenda cuivie aiya! ||
>"A coincidence, as we say in Middle-Earth" (JRR Tolkien)

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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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