Re: Confusatory

On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 08:12:47PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 7:47 pm -0500 11/6/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> >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.
Yes, but why...

[snip]
> 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/.
Hmm, how did /tiU/ become /tsio/, if (as I've always thought, and as you
said) that the /t/ palatalization only happens before the *glide* /j/?

> >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.
True enough, but I don't see how it's relevant; I was speaking only of the
merger of [t_j] and [k_j], not the orthography.

> 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.
Tidy up? But Portuguese looks so much nicer, with those cedillas everywhere
:)

> >Related topic: Does anyone know why /c/ and /j\/ [...]
> >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.)
Yeah, I was thinking of German. Presumably, there are other languages where
plain stops went to affricates across the board, instead of just in one
point of articulation.

> >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`].
I assume by [t`] and [k`] you mean here palatalized, instead of retroflex.
Following that assumption, I agree with you there, but if [k_j] had already
shifted to [c], there wouldn't be a [k_j] for it to be close to; and I don't
know where the [t_j] would come from.

--
Eric Christopherson | Rakko

Reply