Re: Shady Austronesian Linguistics

At 01:59 16.7.2000 -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
It would be sad to see all those lovely Latin words reduced to
CVCVCV...., but so be it.

Most Romance languages actually went quite some way down that road -- most
"successfully" Portuguese and French, AFAIK -- by different means such as
        CC > VC (e.g. FACTU > fait, ACTU > auto -- Rumanian also has pt > ut)
        VN > V~ (e.g. -TIONE > /sa~o~/ in Portuguese
        #CL > Cj (CLARU > chiaro /kjaro/
                imagine CRASSU > kiasu or even giasu!
Portuguese also tends to lose intervocalic N and L, plus mixing up R and L
(e.g. GENERALE > geral, BLANCU > branco).

Add to that the Romance tendency for intervocalic lenition, which might give
Polynesian-like outcomes:
        P/B > u -- CAPIO > kauio (or P > u? => kau'io
        T/D > r -- MEDIU > meri
        K/G > i -- LOCU > loi
Or what about PTK all > glottal stop?  BTW Spanish mostly loses intervocalic
DG, as in veer, leer < VIDERE, LEGERE.

Thus there are many paths other than silly ephenthesis.

FWIW Rumiyaan lenitions are partly "weird" too:

S > h  -- even zero unless h ends up final or the following V is stressed.
D > z  -- as Persian does to Arabic /D/!
G > Q  -- i.e. voiced velar fricative {gh/q}!
G > j / E|I_V
G > Z / V_E|I  -- i.e. voiced palatoalveolar fricative {zh}
TJ > S / _V  -- much as in modern French...
DJ > J / _V -- again rather French, tho MANDUCARE > mandjaa /m&n'dZA/,
                and DIABOLU > djab (one of the few indicators that there were
                christians among the original COHORTES.

Now, who can guess what COHORTES became in Rumiyaan? ;-)

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ANSWER: kaardaan 'clans'.


/BP
--
  B.Philip Jonsson <bpX@...> <melroch@...>
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