Re: Droppin' Ds

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:55:24 -0400, Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>
wrote:

>On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
>
>>- A more special rule comes to my mind: [au] becomes [a] before stressed
>>[u]: _August(um)_ > Old French _aoust_, Sp. and Pg. _Agosto_; auscultare
>>> Old Spanish _ascuchar_, and a couple other examples. But,
interestingly,
>>all of them seem to be about the initial [au] (OTOH, I can't immediately
>>recall a Latin word with non-initial [au] before [u]).
>
>Was the -u- accented in OS ascucar?
Oh, sorry. The rule was formulated this way (IIRC) in some book. Perhaps,
it cited some form with unstressed ending: _auscultat_ > _ascucha_ or
something. But when I think of it, I can't actually say if the stress was
important. Maybe, '[au] before [u] in the next syllable' would be enough.

In fact, forms of this verb are typically re-interpreted as beginning with
_ex-_, kinda *excultare, in the W-Romance area: later Sp. _escuchar_,
Fr. _écouter_, etc. So it doesn't seem impossible that _ascuchar_ was
actually another similar reinterpretation: *abscultare or something.


Basilius


Basilius