Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000 17:22:52 -0700, Barry Garcia
<Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:

>I've always wondered how Spanish for instance got to the conjugations of
>habere like it has, i can see it in some instances, but it escapes me in
>others (perhaps i'm not looking hard enough? :))
_Habere_ and a few other words that often lost their stress seem to have
had contracted forms already in late Vulgar Latin. The 'proto-West-Romance'
paradigm of _habere_ in the present tense was something like the following:

*hai/*hau, *has, *hat, habemus, habetis, *haunt (/habent/*habunt)

- with some dialectal variation (and perhaps the h's already dropped).

But I don't think this is a mandatory thing for a para-Romance artlang.
What is wrong with using the regular derivates of _habes_, _habet_
( > _awes_, _awe_ in your conlang, as far as I can guess)?

Technically, it's easier to start from Classical Latin, or an earlier
form of Vulgar Latin (like e. g. the language of Plautus' comedies).


Basilius