Re: /w/ vs /B/

Hi!

Roger Mills writes:
> BP Jonsson wrote:
>
> > On 28.5.2007 caeruleancentaur wrote:
> > > When I was studying Spanish at the university, one of our profesoras
> > > would, on occasion, treat us to some Spanglish.  One of the ones I
> > > remember was "windshield," pronounced /'gwintSil/.
> >
> > That's exactly how Common Romance treted Germanic *w! :-)
> > Provençal did the same in native words like TENUIT >
> > _tengue_ :-9
> >
> And even still in novelists' dialect imitations (perhaps substandard?)--
> hueso ['weso] 'bone' ~ güeso ['gweso], huevo 'egg' ~güevo. One even finds
> "güeno" for bueno.
Aha!  For Germanic loans, I knew this shift, but the native Romance
shifts are new to me.  Fascinating.  Especially how /o/ first breaks
into /we/ and then moves further to /gwe/.  So /o/ > /gwe/ is
perfectly feasible. :-)  (And so seems /bo/ > /gwe/.)

I think I will experiment with this, maybe in Terkunan.  It currently
likes to drop glides except for only a few phonological contexts, but
instead of boringly dropping /w/, there might be some room for further
exploration.

**Henrik

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