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prothesis (was: isle > ile?)

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 17, 2001, 6:22
At 1:19 pm -0500 16/1/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote: > >> épée <- Old French espee >> <- Latin (ill)a spatha (with wrong cut) > >Actually, the first e in epee is not from the article, but >is from the same principle that prefixes e to all initial s+stop in >Spanish today. This sound-law (status > estat > etat, e.g) >is no longer live in French, which now has plenty of more >recent words with s+stop initial.
Yes, it's a pretty common phenomenon known as 'prothesis'.
>ObConlang: Brithenig has the living version of the rule, >but the prefix is y- /i/.
And this is so in Welsh, cf. ysgol (school), ystryd (street).
>This is also the prefix in >Turkish: Gr. [Kon]stantinopol- > Ar. [as-]Stamboul > > T. Istanbul.
I'd always understood the Arabic /stambul/ to be from northern Greek: [stm='bul] = southern Greek [stim'boli] (written {sthn póli(n)} where {h} = eta) = in the city. But the Turkish certainly shows prothesis, as does the Turkish _istasyon_ = (railway/railroad) station. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================