Re: Whatever happened to Cosseran?

I wrote:
> >Latin *faminem > Vulgar Latin *famne > early Lainesco fabne or favne >
I found out after writing this that the Classical Latin word was famen.
Apparently in Spain it was reanalyzed as *faminem, which yielded famne.

On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 11:59:18PM -0800, Barry Garcia wrote:
> I found a different way the m'n (when a vowel is lost) group can go (at
> least in my mind ;)).
>
> /mn/ > /nn/ > /Nn/ : feminam > femna > fenna > feñna /feNna/, faminem >
> famne > fanne > fañne (but i dont know if i'll keep that final e or not
> (the dropping of final e's is a later development in the language, fairly
> recent, i decree)
>
> other words:
>
> hominem > homne > honne > hoñne / hoñn - mam
> seminat > semna > senna > sèñna
> nomine > nomne > nonne > noñne / noñn
> stamine > stamne > stanne > stañne / stañn
> consuetumine > costumne > costunne > costuñne / costuñn
> certitumine > certitumne > certidunne > çertiúñne / çertiúñn
Looks cool :) (And you came up with other m'n words I couldn't think of!)
It's thought that <gn> in Latin was actually /Nn/, and that later became
/JJ/. /nn/ > /Nn/ seems a bit odd to me, but it's just dissimilation, not
too strange in the grand scheme of things. FWIW, I've thought about using
/mn/ > /nn/ and then maybe > /JJ/, but I'm really not sure what to do. Maybe
different dialects can have different ways of dealing with /mn/. I just know
that I dislike the /mbr/ approach of Spanish :)

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo