Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 15:01:07 +0100 "Raymond A. Brown"
<raybrown@...> writes:
>>>...... Also, how do you reason the
>>>change from [w] to [f]?  I realize they're both labial, but why
>would
>>>it devoice like that?  For most cases of [pf] I've seen, if they
>>>change,
>>>turn into fricatives, not stops.
>>In Judean, all /w/s turned into either [v] or [f], depending on the
>>environment.
>Fine - that I'll buy  :)
Finally, *something* in what i've said that's plausible! :)

>Now
>we could imagine that the Latin declension had given way to possibly
>just
>three cases: nom., Acc. & GenDat (a blend of the old genitive & dative
>Romanian would suggest this).  This is in line also with Greek
>development.
>In the 1st declension we know that the Nom. & Acc. had fallen together
>in
>speech probably as early as the 1st cent. AD., thus: puella, puellas.
>There was certainly a tendency for this to happen elsewhere.  Thus we
>could
>well have had a two case system common in the spoken Latin of this
>area:
>         SING.       PLURAL
>NomAcc. puella       puella:s
>GenDat. puelle       puella:ru
>Only three declensions survived in spoken Latin, so with the effect of
>analogy etc. we could end up with a system like this ('manus'
>certainly
>survived & joined the 2nd declension).  So we could have something
>like
>this (stress on penultimate syllable):
>1st decl.
>               SING.       PLURAL
>construct     pela         pelar
>absolute      pele         pelaru
>(I rather liked pfela ;)
>
>2nd decl.
>               SING.       PLURAL
>construct     manu        manor
>absolute      mani        manoru
>
>3rd decl.
>               SING.       PLURAL
>construct     ponte        ponter
>absolute      ponti        ponteru
>
>Which is certainly different :)
>
>(Analogy might also continue to work to make the singulars a bit more
>'regular' in the way the plurals are.)
>
>Ray.
>
I like it, it's certainly more plausible...and i like the shift from
cases to states, although i didn't actually mean that when i rationalized
about the absolute state.
Although i don't quite get the stages in the evolution of the
words....how do the Nom&Acc and Gen&Dat mergings happen?
And how come you shortened the long vowels before the -ru ?

I need to learn some Latin....maybe i should wait until after this wave
of schoolwork to really get into this, hrmph.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "God punishes - humans take revenge."

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