Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
> 16-12-03 06:03, alex wrote:
>
>> Do you intend to say that unstressed "e" or "i" determined the
>> palatalisation of "n" ?
>
> A front vowel or glide in an unstressed syllable palatalised the
> preceding consonant, and a palatal off-glide developed by assimilation
> after the vowel of the preceding syllable.
>
> Piotr
Dear Piotr, I allow myself to split up your sentence here as follow:
A)
> A front vowel or glide in an unstressed syllable palatalised the
> preceding consonant,
--this is true
B)
> and a palatal off-glide developed by assimilation
> after the vowel of the preceding syllable.
-- this appears to be false.
The reflex of the palatalisation of "n" in Rom. is simply its
dissappearance. Just some reflexes of it:
- in conj. of some verbs like a spune (to say)
eu spun , tu spui, el spune, ; eu spui < eu spuni via spuni > spun^i >
spui
- in plural forms as "frâie,brâie"; if for "brâie" one can say there has
been no "n" ( though Alb. form shows the "n") then for "frâie" which is
plural of "frâu" the etymology is considered Latin "frenum".
- in some other words as "tãmâie", "râie", "cãpãtâi", "cãlcâi" where the
etymological forms are "tamanea", "ranea", "capitaneus", "calcaneus",
etc.
That are the reflexes of this palatalisation you are speaking about.
There is no off-glide here and the "n" as expected, gets lost being
assimilated by "i". Now, Rosetti see in "âi" a diphtongation of "â" and
he explain it trough an "anticipation" of the sound "i" which follows
after "n" and he agrees too that the forms should be analogicaly. With
one word, the change has been maybe in an word as "pâne" > "pâine" and
from here all the other words have been analogicaly formed.
His explanation seems forced as well as your explanation.
I don't think that the change "â" > "âi" before "n" happened because of
the plural form with "i" _even if I agree_ there must be an "i" for
having this palatalisation. Why I don't? Because for instance an word as
"sân" with pl. "sâni" does not show a such change.
It remains just what I observed before where I will say more criticaly ,
that the change "â" > "âi" happened just in the group "-ane" and not in
the groups "-ane/-ani" as said previous.
Against of the group "-ani" speaks all the words which ends in pl. in
"-ani" and "-âni"and it does not make sense to give some example since
they are too numerous for it.
Since the discution took this path because of the supposed
simplification of "âi" to "i" , one has to underline that there is no
viable example which shows a such transformation, since - as I mentioned
in the begining - once being there, the group "âi" become very strong
and stable and does not simplify to anything more. Thus the change
assumed by Miguel *ex-cambio > *scâmba > *scâimba > skimba appears to
not be validated by known facts.
I agree, it is maybe easy to criticse and one has to give a solution by
himself for the change in discution, thus to the question "why /-âne/ >
/-âine/" and not "-âie". I don't belive in a logical phonetic change
here; it appears that the "n" was keept consciously there in these words
but this can be simply a wrong guess.
Alex