Re: Confusatory

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)


In Old French:
{ch} = [tS],
{j} (i.e. consonant {i}, since {i} and {j} not differentiated in writing at
that time) and soft-g = [dZ]
soft-c = [ts]

Such words taken into Middle English retained the first two sounds since
they existed also in English, and retain them till the present day, e.g.:
chair, chance, change, damage, gender, gentle, journey.

But Old English always simplified /ts/ to [s] and the /ts/ affricate was
not part of Middle English, so although the soft-c was undoubtedly
pronounced [ts] by the Norman gentry, when such words were taken on board
by Saxons it simply became [s], as it still is.

In France the affricates began losing their dental onsets somewhere about
the middle of the 13th cent., giving the familar modern French
pronunciations.  Exactly parallel developments went on in Portuguese, tho I
don't know when they began.

In the case of Spain, the medieval [ts] became [T] in Castilian, but [s] in
Andalucian.

Hope this helps.

Ray.


=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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