Re: Pilovese in the Romance Language Family

Maybe you don't need to decide whether a language which is situated
smack on the border between Gaul and Iberia belongs to the one or the
other. The Pyrenees aren't a tight linguistic barrier[^1]: Provensal
and Catalan are originally a single dialect continuum (or rather a
sub-continuum within the larger Romance continuum!) which became
divided for political reasons (check out "Battle of Muret" on
Wikipedia!) and there are affinities between Gascon and the northern
dialects of Aragonese, some of them caused by both having been
influenced by Basque, and Basque itself is spoken on both sides of the
mountains as well as *in* the mountains.

[^1]: And neither is the sea: there are affinities between south
Italian and Iberian dialects too.

AFMOC Rhodrese has affinities with both French and Central Italian,
which wouldn't be possible in our world, so obviously things are
different in it's world! :-)

2008/4/3, Scotto Hlad <scott.hlad@...>:
> I have struggled with this as I only know a limited amout about the tree of
> Romance languages. (See Wikipedia
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Romance_languages_improved.PNG)
>
> I can see clearly that Pilovese is a Western Romance but I'm not sure
> whether to categorize it as Gallo Romance or Iberian Romance. Some of the
> sound changes look like French, some like Occitan, some like Portugues and a
> few like Spanish.
>
> I'm puzzling at the moment over a particular word which may push the
> decision. It is the word for small as in small in stature.
> French: petit
> Occitan: petit
> Portuguese: pequeno
> Spanish: pequeno
>
> As far as I have been able to determine they all descend from the word
> pettittus or pitzinus or pisinnus which I presume are all the same word. Is
> there anyone that can clarify this for me and perhaps show me how these
> roots came to be pequeno? I can see how it got to petit and indeed the
> Pilovese sound changes make it look like "pitit." I frankly don't like that
> word. If it turns out that the derivation of pequeno pushes to a different
> direction then it may be that this is Iberian Romance. I suspect that I have
> not give enough information for further classification, perhaps someone can
> give me more information to base my decision.
>
> Scotto
>

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/ BP