Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

At 4:51 am -0500 24/11/00, Jeff Jones wrote:
>On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 21:23:19 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
>wrote:
>
>>At 12:46 pm -0500 23/11/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>>[....]
>>>
>>> According to what I've read, all cases of orthographic <ens> were
>>> pronounced without the nasal even in Classical Latin.
>>
>> Absolutely correct - this is stated by several Roman writers.
>
>Well, Hale and Buck agree with you.
And Cicero & other Roman writers, including anonymous graffiti writers  :)
Also the testimony of the Romance languages make this fairly clear.

>But I'm not so sure this applied to
>vowels that weren't already long, at least in Vulgar Latin.
But the evidence is that all such vowels are long.

>After all,
>Spanish has <pienso> and other forms from Latin short <-ens->.
As I wrote in an earlier mail, it is evident that "spelling pronunciations"
were around in the late Empire - one of the effects of widespread basic
literacy  :)

Latin _pensum_ /pe:su/ gave Old French _pois_ (now spelled _poids_ through
etymology connecting it with _pondus_!).

>I also note
>that my references say that the (resulting) long vowel was nasalized.
Probaby when the development took place - but there is AFAIK no evidence
that the long vowels nasalized in Classical Latin any more than the long
vowels in Old English which had developed by a similar process, e.g.
mú /mu:T/ <-- *munT (cf. German _Mund_, Dutch _mond_, Danish _Mund_).
tó /to:T/ <-- *tonT (cf. Gothic _tunthus_, Dutch _tand_, Danish _Tand_;
Latin _dent- )
gós /go:s? <-- *gons (cf. German _Gans_, Dutch _gans_; Latin _hanser_/ _anser_)

>>> Except for the participle ending <-ens>, where the [n] stuck because of
>>> analogy with other cases, e.g. acc <-entem>.
>>
>>..and that was an artificially preserved form among the learned - in
>>popular Latin the nom. was reformed as -ntis.
>>
>>> In fact, nasals generally weren't pronounced in front of the open
>>> sounds /f s/, even by conservatives like Cicero. So 'infans' would have
>>> been pronounced [i:fa:s] (I think that's correct vowel length, not sure).
>>
>>Correct.
>
>Possibly [i~fa~s], or [infa~s] since the experts seem to be less certain
>about <-nf->.
The lengthening of the vowel before -nf- is AFAIK not disputed, but it is
true there is no direct evidence that the -n- was silent.  But the
langthening of the vowel needs explanation and the behavior of the -Vns-
sequence does suggest that in the high Classical period it was /i:fa:s/.

French _enfant_ can be derived only from a form with initial _short_ /i/,
which makes it even more obvious to me that we have a spelling
pronunciation widely used in Gallic Latin of the late Empire.

[....]
>>
>>It certainly was considered rustic; in Gaul and the Iberian peninsular the
>>final -s remained and was re-inforced through the schools (provincials
>>wanting to be "more Roman than the Romans").  Even in Italy and the easten
>>provinces it does not appear to have been simply dropped but rather to have
>>give way to a palatal sound in popular speech, cf. Italian: duoi  <-- duos.
>
>Modern standard Italian seems to have some forms which have been fronted in
>that way and others where the -s is simply dropped.
Yes, after stressed syllables, e.g. città <-- ci:uita:s

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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