Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

On Fri, 24 Nov 2000 07:41:31 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>At 11:32 pm -0500 23/11/00, Elliott Lash wrote:
>> 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
>>
>"Spelling pronunciations" are not merely a feature of English.  They must
>surely occur in any literate society where pronunciation and spelling part
>company.  They certainly occurred in Latin of the Empire - one comes across
>lots of give-away hyper-corrections in later writings.
>
>One must remember that Latin was acquired originally as an L2 before
>becoming an L1 in many parts of the Empire. And where this happens, the L1
>that develops in that area is often a 'purer' form of the language than
>that used by the descendants of those who have spoken the language for
>centuries. An interesting example is the English of Scotland. The
>Lowlands have been English (or 'Scots') speaking for ever since ancient
>British died out; some of the modern dialects there are difficult for us
>southerners to understand.  But move further north into the Highlands, and
>one hears English beautifully enunciated and spoken more clearly than we
>southerns habitually speak it.  The Highlands remained Gaelic speaking and
>acquired English much later than the Lowlanders, learning it first as an L2
>lang.
I understand that the Lowlanders also retain a lot of Anglosaxon words
which have been lost in other forms of English.

>Similar things seem to have gone on in parts of the Roman world; the effect
>of "school" Latin seems to have been paricularly strong in north Gaul.  So
>the fact that Old French has 'enfes', 'enfant' etc doesn't tell us IMO too
>much about the Latin of Rome in the late Republic and early Empire, but
>rather that in the Latin of the late Empire in Gaul a 'restored'
>pronunciation *[Infas], *[Infante] was used.
>
>Ray.
I wonder if this principle explains Sardinian velars and vowels?

Jeff