Re: Vulgar Latin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of Raymond Brown
> Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 12:10 AM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Vulgar Latin
> At 7:42 pm -0500 9/1/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >Wasn't the 1st declension nom. pl. -e or -ae?
>
> No - the evidence is that the nom. & acc. plural were both -as.
[...]
> The modern Italian & Romanian plural -e developed from -as.  The final -s
> in the eastern dialects gave way to some palatal sound, and /aj/ --> /e/.
> If the plural 'amice' had survived we'd expect the plural of 'amica'
> /amika/ to be /amitSe/ in modern Italian, just as the plural of /amiko/ is
> /amitSi/ - it isn't.  The plural is /amike/ 'amiche'  <--- amicas.
I asked a Latinist friend of mine (with a master's degree in the classics)
about this, and he said that nom. -as was current in Western Proto-Romance
(and VL?) but not in the other varieties, such as those leading to Italian
and Romanian. He also says (this agrees with what I've read also) that
the -e in Italian _is_ from Latin -ae, and the unpalatalized sound in amiche
and other words is the result of analogy.

(quoting Ray's reply to myself here:)
> >/di/ and /de/ before
> >vowels sometimes became /dZj/ or /dzj/, but not always (IIRC);
>
> It seems to have developed to [dZ] even where /ti/ --> [ts(j)]
Aren't there counterexamples to this statement in Italian? IIRC, in some
words it became /dz/ (mezzo<medium) and in some /dZ/ (raggio<radium).

> >on top of
> >that, in some words /ti/ and /te/ before vowels became voiced and
> >affricated, but not in others.
>
> Oh yes, the voicing of intervocalic plosives was by no means universal.
> That it happened in areas where Celtic influence had been greatest is,
> perhaps, no co-incidence.
Actually, I meant it's inconsistent in the same language; in Old Spanish,
intervocalic unvoiced stops usually become voiced, but /tj/ is
unpredictable. Its outcome was unvoiced in plaça<platea (modern plaza), but
voiced in razón<rationem. That difference is obscured now by the fact that
all sibilants later became unvoiced.


Eric Christopherson
raccoon@elknet.net