Re: Norman French (was: Thorn vs Eth)

On Friday, July 12, 2002, at 01:39 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
{agreed bits snipped}

>> only
>> make intelligent guesses.   One wonders what evidence your book gives
>> for
>> [T]
>> and [D] having disappeared everywhere by the XIth cent.
>
> Orthographic mistakes, forgotten final |t|s showing that it was not
> pronounced
> anymore.
Fair enough - but the {th} at the end of _faith_ came from somwhere & the
word
comes from French.

I'm wondering whether final [T] might not have persisted longer at the end
of
monosyllabic words than it did elsewhere.  I can well imagine, e.g. that
the final
{t} of verb forms like _chantet_ [tSant@T] (s/he sings) may well have been
among
the first to go.

It reminds me somewhat of final -m in Latin.   We know from Classical
Latin prosody
that final -m was silent well before the end of the BC period.  It's
generally supposed
that the preceding vowel was nasalized.

But the position in Vulgar Latin was
somewhat different.  There is no evidence of any final nasalization in
polysyllabic
words - the final written -am, -em & -um having become plain [a], [e] and
[U]/[o]
respectively.   But monosyllabic words did retain the nasal _as a
consonant_
namely /n/, e.g.
C.L. rem ---> V.L. *ren --> Fr.  rien
C.L quem ---> V.L. *kwen ---> Sp. quien

I'm suggesting that whereas final [T] had been disappearing like mad
sometime
before the XIth cent., it did hang on in monosyllables like _feit_ until
the late in the
century or even into early XIIth cent.

{snip}

>> Just ideas - I guess short of time travel we'll never know all the
>> answers.
>>
>
> Indeed :(( . If ever someone manages to invent a time-travelling machine,
> there's a big chance that the first passenger will be a linguist ;))) .
Yep - me, going back to ancient Crete   :)))

Ray.

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