Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

 Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
 So 'infans' would have been
 pronounced [i:fa:s] (I think that's correct vowel length, not sure).

 Then why is the French _enfante_?  Was it a learned borrowing from
 Latin?

    It wasn't a learned borrowing from Latin, but an oblique form inherited
from Old French. In Old French the paradigm for this noun was:
  enfes  enfant
  enfant  enfanz

    I don't think the Classical Latin was /i:fa:s/, judging from the presence
of the n in Old French. BTW the word in French is "enfant" not "enfante"  (At
least i'm 80% sure)