Re: Romola instead of Romula?

At 4:30 pm +0100 17/1/00, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>At 02:51 17/01/00 PST, you wrote:
[snip]
>>in Classical Latin, thus it must become -o- in a western Romance lang. E.g.
>>Romulus is Romolo in modern Italian.
>>
>>The same goes, as I understand, for all words with post-stressed -u- in
>>Classical Latin: articolo instead of articulo, tabola instead of tabula,
>>popolo instead of populo etc. But: populare (u is pre-stressed).
>>
>>Am I right in doing this changing?
I suspect 'populare' is a learned borrowing & not directly inherited from
Vulgar Latin.

>
>        I'm not sure. What you say is right in Italian, but in French the 'u'
>simply disappeared ('article' from 'articulus', 'peuple' from 'populus')
>and in Spanish it also disappears ('pueblo' from 'populus') or is retained
>('arti'culo' (with stress on the 'i') from 'articulus' - this one may be a
>borrowing from Classical Latin however - ).
What Christophe says is correct (and Spanish 'artículo' is a learned
borrowing from Classical Latin as he says).   In western Romance outside of
Italy, the 'u' disappears.   This would, I assume, give 'Rombla' (with -ml-
--> -mbl- ).

Italian, however, retains the vowel and it would be, as Artem says 'Romola'.

But, of course, since the name is derived from the demi-god 'Romulus',
traditionally 1st king of Rome, learned tradition may have kept the form
'Romula' alive.

(I definitely don't like 'Rombla'  ;)

Ray.



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