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Re: Confusatory

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 12, 2001, 19:13
At 7:47 pm -0500 11/6/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
[snip]
>> >> No, no - it was something like: >> >> ts (Western Romance) >> k_j >> t_j >> tC >> >> tS (Central and eastern Romance) > >Where did [t_j] come from? I would think a straight line from k > k_j > c > >cC > tS and/or ts would make more sense. Or is there evidence to the effect >that k_j actually became t_j?
Guess work - I was assuming that it would behave in a similar way to /k/ before front vowels in modern continental Scandinavian langs. Also the sound merged with palatalized /t/ over a large part of the Romance word, see below. [c] seems to be unstable, in any case, and is notoriously liable to become an affricate.
>Now, there was also the tj > ts(j) change in Latin, but I don't know when >each change started and finished.
The change of /tj/ >> /tsj/ (with whatever intervening stages) began earlier and remained confined to instances where Latin /ti/ preceeded a vowel; it did not affect /t/ generally before /i/ and /e/ in the same way that /k/ later palatalized (Romanian is rather different; but there we have Slavic influence). In some places, e.g. Gaul & the Iberian peninsular, palatalized /k/ caught up with it, so to speak, and the two sounds did merge. In medieval Latin in these areas, and in Britain (and elsewhere) we find spellings like _gracia_, _nacio_ for the Classical Latin _gratia_, _natio_. Early in English we wrote _nacioun_ where we now write _nation_. But in Italy & Romania the palatalized /t/ remained separate from the later palatalized /k/; the former is /ts/ as in _nazione_ or _zio_ (uncle << /tiU/), and the latter is /tS/ as in _cinque_ [tSiNkwe] << VL *cinque /kinkwe/.
>But now that I say that, I recall that >/t/ before yod AND /k/ before front vowels came out identically in Spanish, >so perhaps they did merge at some time to [t_j]. (But then mightn't [k_j] be >just as good a possibility? :) )
Not likely as in medieval Spanish soft-c and {cz} = [ts]. At the time {z} = [dz], so that to represent [ts] before a back vowel they adopted the convention of {cz}, eventually putting the {z} _beneath_ the {c} and hence inventing the cedilla ('little zed)! The diacritic still has its Spanish name in English. Later [dz] was devoiced to merge with [ts] which became the modern [T] in Castillian and [s] in Andalucian and gave the Spaniards the opportunity to tidy up their spelling and drop the cedilla entirely.
> >Related topic: Does anyone know why /c/ and /j\/ (err, I think that's >X-SAMPA for barred-j, the voiced palatal stop, but I'm too lazy too look it >up ;) )
'tis correct.
>seem to become affricates so frequently, where other stops don't?
But what other stops would go that way? (I suppose aspirated /p/ became /pf/ in High German.)
>I've wondered that for quite a while, and my guess would be that as a plain >stop they sound to close to either the alveolars or the velars, but I'm >really not sure.
Certainly [c] is close to both [t`] and [k`]. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================

Replies

Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>