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Re: CHAT: History of «ir»

From:R A Brown <ray@...>
Date:Thursday, July 5, 2007, 13:00
Elliott Lash wrote:
[snip]
>>These compounds are of course literary; AFAIK they >>didn't survive in >>Vulgar Latin. The hesitation in the perfect form of >>_evadere_ might >>suggest the perfect itself was a literary formation. >>Interesting. >> > > They are attested in French, however at least one may > be some sort of borrowing: > > 1) s'evader > (clearly a borrowing, -d- is still present, and the > infinitive ending is as if it is from *evadare)
Yes, clearly a learned borrowing made directly from Latin.
> 2) envahir > (Not so clearly a borrowing, it seems to show the > confusion of infinitive endings that occured in Old > French between -re (-ere), -oir (-e:re) and -ir (-ire) > verbs. Also, the -d- is replaced by a hiatus, > represented by -h-)
Yes the -d- has followed the normal development of [D] which subsequently fell silent. I have checked and it does appear that this is derived from a Gallo-Romance *invadíre where the verb has joined the 4th conjugation. In modern French _envahir_ is a normal -ir verb, which is what one would expect a Latin 4th conj. verb to be. As far as I can tell, *invadíre seems to have been peculiar to Gallo-Romance. There is no evidence AFAIK from Romance that _vadere_ joined the 4th conj. - indeed, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of the survival of an infinitive form in Romance. I wonder if there was any connexion in the popular mind between *invadíre and those forms of _vadere_ that remained in popular use. As far I see it, _vadere_ survived in Vulgar Latin only in the present indicative & subjunctive, and in the imperative. Indeed, the -d- seems to have disappeared even in VL of Gaul and Iberia; in the latter, indeed, the verb seems to have joined the 1st conj, i.e. *vo, *vas, *va(t), *vamus, *vatis, *van(t). It seems to have been similar in Gaul, tho the French _vont_ must be derived from *vaunt. In French the development of the present of _al(l)er_ (it had only one l in Old French) has clearly be influenced by the conjugation of _avoir_. It's all very interesting - but I guess someone must have already made a study of the development of "to go" from Vulgar Latin to modern Romance. -- Ray ================================== ray@carolandray.plus.com http://www.carolandray.plus.com ================================== Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu. There's none too old to learn. [WELSH PROVERB]

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>