Re: Confusatory

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.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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