Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.

At 10:35 pm +0000 3/6/01, kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET wrote:
[snip]
>>> katus - katowes (battle)  ---  cad - cadau (the commonest pl. ending)
[snip]
>
>So (Latin grammar in hand) that would put katus in the 4th Dec. (?)
>OB /katus, katum - katu:s/
>Which would give your original ill cad - llo chad
>Of course it's possible that the word switched declensions when it was
>borrowed,
If it was being taken into the written, literary language, maybe - but not
if it's being borrowed in the spoken Vulgar Latin of Roman Britain, since
VL retained only the 1st, 2nd & 3rd declensions.

Even in Classical Latin we find hesitation in some words between 2nd & 4th
declension; _domus_ is the obvious one which has mixed forms even in the
best literary texts.  But 2nd decl. endings appear in inscriptions from the
Classical period, e.g. senati (= senatus), portico (= porticu), mano (=
manu), sumptis (= sumptibus), spirito (= spiritu) etc.

It's fairly clear that this process had been completed in the spoken
language when Vulgar Latin was brought to Britain.

Vulgar Latin, in fact, retained only the first three declensions.  The 4th
was absorbed into the second.

The 5th decl. tended to merge with the first.  This was helped by the fact
that in literary Classical Latin we have doublets like _materia_ or
_materies_, which facilitated the shift of _dies_, _glacies_, _facies_,
_rabies_ etc to _dia_, _glacia_, _facia_, _rabia_.  Monosyllabic words such
as _res_ and _spes_ joined the 3rd declension.

For _res_ we get:
        SING.  PLURAL
NOM.    res     res
OBL.    rem     res

_spes_ could be treated like that, but alternative forms are also found:
        SING.      PLURAL
NOM.    spes        speres
OBL.    spere(m)    speres
(On the analogy of _sperare_ "to hope")

or

        SING.       PLURAL
NOM.    spes         spenes
OBL.    spene(m)     spenes

Final -m was, in fact, silent in VL in pollysyllables, but was retained as
/n/ in monosyllables, cf. French _rien_ <-- rem; Spanish _quien_ <-- quem.

To return to British: katus - katowes (battle).  AFAIK there are no
examples of such words surviving in Old French, tho quite few words of
Gallic origin do survive there, so we just have to guess.  It could be that
the nom. _katus_  is taken as the starting points, and the word simply gets
absorbed into the 2nd declension.  But it is also possible that it could've
joined the 3rd decl. thus:
        SING.       PLURAL
NOM.   /katus/      /ka'towes/
OBL.   /ka'towe/    /ka'towes/

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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