Re: Confusatory

On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 08:33:58PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 3:45 am -0400 10/6/01, David Peterson wrote:
> >    This is something that's been bugging me for quite awhile now.  In
> >English, French and Spanish (don't know about Rumanian or Portuguese)
>
> Portuguese behaves just like French, and Romanian just like Italian in the
> matter of the letter {c}.
>
> BTW Spanish behaves like French & Portuguese in this matter only in its
> Andalucian and American varieties; Castilian Spanish has [T} for 'soft-c'
>
> > there's
> >this letter "c" that's pronounced either as an /s/ or a /k/, depending on the
> >vowel it preceeds.  In classical Latin they say that this letter "c" was
> >always pronounced /k/, no matter what the environment.  Fair enough.  What my
> >question is, is how on Earth did /k/ go to /s/ in ANY environment?  I can
> >understand /tS/ in Italian (or at least it makes more sense), but /k/>/s/
> >seems a reach.
>
> No - in Old French, just as in Old Spanish & Portuguese it was [ts] and for
> exactly the same reason as Italian & Romanian [tS], i.e. palatalization.
>
>
> Who knows something about this?  Was the progression
> >/k/>/kj/>/C/>/S/>/s/?
>
> 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?

Now, there was also the tj > ts(j) change in Latin, but I don't know when
each change started and finished. 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? :) )


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 ;) ) seem to become affricates so frequently, where other stops don't?
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.

--
Eric Christopherson | Rakko

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