Re: Pronunciate. *ZAP*

The difficulty here is that there was a moderately productive Latin
derivation which produced new frequentative (?) verbs out of the passive
participle stem of an old verb.  In the case of first declention verbs
this produced a pattern something like:

"to announce" nuntio, nuntiare, nuntiavi, nuntiatus

"to announce frequently" nuntiato...  (I doubt this particular word ever
existed; I'm just throwing it in there to show the pattern.  Maybe
Latinists with better memories can give me a better example.)

Now, our words in -tion-/-cion (Spanish) come from the -tio, -tionis
ending, which built verbal nouns out of verbs, using the fourth
principle part, the same stem which is used in the derivation mentioned
above!

Note that we have two present stems, "nuntio" and "nuntiato" which both
are related (one by inflection, one by derivation) to the verbal noun
"nuntiatio". The one which is *less* related to "nuntiatio" is the one
which is built on the *same stem* as "nuntiatio"

Small matter that these have tended to get mixed up in the development
of Romance languages and English, and that the -at- version occasionally
shows up where it's neither wanted nor needed!

Ed

(corrections invited from people who know more about Romance etymology
of course!)
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