Re: /w/ vs /B/

On Jun 5, 2007, at 12:15 AM, Roger Mills wrote:

> A little late but...
>
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
>> Roger Mills writes:
>>> 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/.)
>
> Not so sure I'd call it a "shift", as it seems restricted AFAICT to
> those
> three words; it's almost a writer's way of saying "this person is a
> peasant
> or low-class" or something. I don't recall ever seeing, for ex.,
> güestro for
> vuestro. But it's true that the Spanish /w/ in the diphth. (in initial
> position at least) and in borrowed words has a strong velar component.
I forgot another example in my last message - <agüelo/-a/-ito/-ita>
for <abuelo> etc. "grandfather/mother".

Also, it may be the case that it's the beginning of a shift. Sound
changes sometimes (often?) start out in only a few words and spread
from there.