Re: Vulgar Latin

At 1:29 am -0600 11/1/00, Tom Wier wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> Besides one still has to account for analogy leveling out 'amica' ~
>> 'amiche', while not leveling out 'amico' ~ 'amici'.  The hypothesis (*not*
>> mine) I hold to explains these forms without analogy working in one case
>> but not the other.
>
>Well, analogy, unlike phonetic sound laws, is much less commonly
>a completely regular phenomenon.   "Kine" may have become "cows", but
>that doesn't mean "men" also had to become "mans".  (Although I'll grant
>it does seem funny on an intuitive level that words so similar as 'amico'
>and 'amica' did not undergo the same analogical leveling.)
Indeed - I'd expect 'amica'/ 'amico' to act more like 'woman'/ 'man' than
like 'cow'/ 'man'   :)

>> But natlangs unfortunately, as I'm sure you know, do not neatly evolved
>> according to certainly fixed laws so that if, e.g. you fed Vulgar Latin
>> into a computer it would then churn out modern French, Spanish or Italian.
As I said in my reply, in fact.

But what we have in Itakian if the fem.pl. -e is derived from Latin -ae, is
the _total_ analogical leveling out of irregular forms caused be earlier
palatalization before final -e with _all_ the 1st declension nouns, while
2nd declension nouns do retain such irregular forms to today.

>> Human beings are so darned unpredictable.
Yep - you'd expect some irregularities to be unpredictably retained from
1st decl. nouns as well as 2nd.

[...]
>not true:  language is not a haphazard, completely irregular phenomenon, but
>is guided by probabilistic principles more like Einsteinian physics.
Exactly so.  So is the total analogical leveling of one set of nouns
probable when a parallel set does not do this?

We know clearly from Old French & Old Provençal, both of which kept the two
case - Noinative, Oblique - system in their written languages, that in
ProtoGalloRomance it was:
  amica   amicas                amicos   amici
  amica   amicas                amico    amicos

Those who hold that Italian plural -e is derived from Latin -ae then must
account for the different development in ProtoItalian and why while there
was a total levelling out of irregular forms for the 1st dec., this did not
affect the 2nd. decl.

Those like myself who hold the view that ProtoItalian & ProtoGalloRomance
had the same forms for these nouns (and I had understood that this was the
more common theory), do not have any 'extras' to account for.

Ray.


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