Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > I'm almost certainly sure there is already a Romance natlang doing
> > that...
>
> Français, n'est-ce pas?  :-)  (Humorous anecdote - my spell-checker
> suggested "Netscape" for n'est-ce!)
>
Indeed (by the way, I bought last Saturday a booklet about Old French, very
interesting!). In Old French it was done (like alba -> aube /aube/, qualis ->
qu(i)eus /k(j)eus/). But after that, two other phenomena (reduction of diphtongs
in the XIIth century, and refection after the Old French period) brought to:
- complete disappearance of the /u/ phoneme coming from Latin /l/ (like aube
/ob/),
- refection of the -l at the end of some words (qu(i)eus left for quel, which
was the normal form in sing. regime case and plural subject case).
This is the origin of some alternations like -al <-> -aux (sing. <-> pl.).

On the other hand, "Roumant" kept this /u/ phoneme.

Christophe.