Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

At 8:28 pm -0600 25/1/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
[....[
>
>Well yes, in the spoken Latin that led to the Romance languages, but this
>doesn't explain how it became /k/ in Church Latin or in <aniquilar>. So
>the question still remains: where would the /k/ come from?
AFAIK it is only in the two words _mihi_ and _nihil_.  As the Church
pronunciation is basically that of Rome, I guess it was simply an attempt
to pronounce /h/ between the two identical vowels which, like the ordinary
English person's realization of /x/, was actually realized as [k].


>> I suspect the /kk/ in Late Latin _acca_ was a reflex of /axa/.
>
>Which would mean intervocalic /h/ > /x/ in some varieties, and then /x/ >
>/k/. It sounds possible...
Again, the /h/ was between two identical vowels.  The difference with
/akka/ is that this was a natural development in the spoken Vulgar Latin
(hence the dialect alternative /aka/ from which Portuguese _aga_ must be
derived), while the Church pronunciation was a learned one, medieval Latin
being a highly successful auxlang but no-one native language.

>> >* The English used by Malory was full of <y> where we would today write
>><i>.
>> >Oddly, I find the letter kind of ugly if used immoderately, and would
>>prefer
>> >for aesthetic reasons replacing most <y>s with <i>, but it seems Malory's
>> >taste prefered the opposite.
>>
>> But then Mallory wrote "Le Morte d'Arthur" which must cause you to wince a
>> little.  I remember many years ago my younger son's French pen-friend
>> getting very upset when he saw the title of Mallory's book, calling him an
>> 'ignoramus' and worse   :)
>
>Not knowing French, that title has never looked at all objectionable to me,
>but now I suppose that <morte> should be feminine,
Exactly - La morte......

  :)

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================