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Re: A problem solved: Arabisms in Spanish

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Thursday, February 18, 1999, 15:58
Raymond A. Brown scripsit:

> >Did Spanish still have original Latin /h/? > > Most certainly not! > NONE of the Romancelangs retained Latin /h/ - indeed, all the evidence we > have from "scoolmaster's notes", graffiti etc. show conclusively that Latin > /h/ was probably having a hard time even before the end of the BC period > and almost certainly disappered from popular speech before the end of the > 1st cent. AD.
True enough. However, Spanish grew a secondary /h/ as a result of a phoneme split: Latin /f/ became sometimes /f/, sometimes /h/, probably through an intermediate stage of an unvoiced bilabial fricative. In Old Spanish, "f" sometimes represents /f/, sometimes /h/. Eventually, a spelling reform took hold, and this /h/ became written "h", which persists even though the phoneme has disappeared. For example, Latin "fabulare" > OSp "fablar" [haBlar] > "hablar" still [haBlar] > "hablar" [aBlar].
> >If it had lost it already, a possible Arabic /h/ could have been > >heard as /x/.
Indeed, "difficult" Arabic sounds often came in as "f" /h/. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.