Re: Some questions about Romance langs

Eric Christopherson wrote:

>On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 7:41:20PM -0400, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>> What is the origin of Spanish "como"/Fr "comme", etc? In desperation, I
>> might answer Latin "quo modo", but I'm all but certain that I'm wrong.
I'm
>> totally stumped :p
>[see below]
>
>> Also, I suppose French "autre" comes from Latin "alter/altra/altrum"
>> (correct forms, right?); Spanish "otro/otra", however, would supposedly
be
>> from "uter/utra/utrum", then? Or is that an isolated case of
l-vocalization
>> in Spanish?
>
>The same l vocalization happened in Spanish, in those words as well as some
>others, such as <cauce> < <CALCE>. I don't know offhand, but I don't think
that process was very widespread in Spanish.

Agree, not very common.  Now that you mention it, there's also "sauce"
'willow tree' < salix~salice-
>
>> Speaking of which, why on earth did that Latin velarized-l only vocalize
to
>> [w]/[u] in French, and not in at least half the Romance languages?
>> Typologically normal, or bizarre (as I'm finding it)? Did it vocalize in
>> Romanian, btw?
>
>As I said, it also happened a bit in Spanish, and also Portuguese
(<outro>),
>and probably others too>
I'm not sure about the Port.-- that might just be a spelling convention {ou}
for /o/, while {o} generally or often is the lower /O/ (IPA backwards c).
Throw in the haphazard use of diacritics, and Port. spelling is IMO a
nightmare.

>I don't know about the typology, but it doesn't seem an unlikely change to
>me. It's happened in various English dialects and Polish, at least.>
Typologically, it would be _one_ of the expected changes; l > y is another
one, as you mention.   And l>w is ongoing in Brazilian Port.  It's just a
few centuries behind French.  Like Spanish, with its ongoing loss of final
and pre-consonantal /s/.

>Not to me. I'm told that that accentuation came from its use as a set
>phrase, therefore phonologically a single word (Actually, I just checked my
>dictionary and it's listed as <quo:modo>, with no space). As you know, the
>accent on words with a light penultimate (short vowel, vowel-final)
syllable
>falls on the ante-penult, thus /"k_wo:modo/. What puzzles me is why the
>middle syllable didn't just drop, leaving */"k_wo:mdo/.
Probably because d-lenition happened first, producing the anomalous
/"k_wo:mo:/