Re: Distribution of Front Rounded Vowels

David Peterson wrote:
> Actually, thinking about French, it isn't too bad.
>
> Related to French, are there any French historians out there?
(Is Sanford Schane still at UCSD? He's one.)  Not me, but some guesses--
the development of Fr. /y/ depended on various factors:  short/long in
Vulgar or Classical Latin(?); open/closed syllable; following vowel.  As
well as consonant deletion.

so duce-, unu/a- luna- > /y/
but dulce- > /u/ via [duwke-], and totu- > todu > tou = /tu/
also tour 'tower' < turre-, gout < gustV-

Not sure where "fou" or "roux" come from, though...."folle" and "folie"
suggest an /l/ was involved, maybe ?*f(uo)ljV- or ?*f(uo)llV-, and since "x"
can indicate "*-lC" -- cf. *dulke- > "doux"-- maybe ?*r(uo)lCV-

   Because if
> all
> *u's became [y], and sequences of *ou became [u], it would seem to me that
> [y] would be more common in the present language than [u].   Is this the
> case?
Aside from its occurrence in some very common words (une, du etc), I'd doubt
it....

 The French letter frequencies found here...
>
> http://www.cryptogram.org/cdb/words/frequency.txt
>
> ...aren't good enough because they deal with letters, not sounds.
Surely there's a list of _phoneme_ frequencies???

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