Re: Droppin' Ds

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 06:57:11 +0100, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>At 4:22 pm -0700 19/9/00, Barry Garcia wrote:
<...>
>>- Initially, au remains, but in other positions it becomes /o/. Not sure
>>how natural that is.
>
>Not very, I think.  It does seem that /au/ remained until the early
Romance
>period.  But AFAIK all the Romance langs treat the diphthong the same way
>in all positions.
- 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]).

In general, a different treatment of a vowel for the word-initial
position doesn't seem unnatural to me at all. For example, in Portuguese
(the 'peninsular' form of it) unstressed <e> is mostly [@], in special
cases [I], but word-initially always [I]. In French, too, unstressed
[e] becomes [@] and then zero in open syllables - but *not* in the initial
position.

>It happened in French, but as part of a sound change whereby syllable
final
>/s/ became /h/ and was then dropped.  To restrict the dropping of -s- just
>to st-  --> est-  --> et- would be very strange.
Looks strange to me, too. As soon as you've added the [e-], the position
of [s] doesn't differ in anything particular from all other [s] between a
vowel and a voiceless stop.

However, if you (B. G.) wish to get less homonyms, you could introduce a
special treatment depending e. g. on vowel quality. For example, next to
a front vowel, [sC] > [SC] > [hC] > [C], but following a back one the [sC]
remains. Some contractions and loanwords could then fill in the gaps in
the positional distribution.

>In
>Portuguese the palatalization tends to affect the /t/ so that it sounds
>more like IIRC /nOitS@/ (I'm sure Portuguese speakers here will correct
>this).
In Brazil, [t] > [tS] before any front vowel, hence [noitSI], but [oitu].
In Portugal this doesn't happen: [noit@] (AFAIK).

> If you just want a "fun
>language" made up indiscrimately of bits & pieces of different Romance
>langs, then it doesn't matter a great deal what you do.  But tho the
result
>may be fun, do not expect it to look like (or sound like) a 'natural'
>Romance lang.  If you want to derive a plausible 'alternate' Romancelang
>then you have to use consistent 'rules' based on those actually attested.
- Hear! hear!


Basilius