Re: [tied] Romanian verbal paradigm (Re: Late Proto Albanian...)

> While one might reasonably expect Latin to have the imperfect
> *dormi:bam, such forms did not catch on,

Early Latin shows these forms, which survive to the Classical period
alongside the -ie- forms which replace them, except in ibam "I was going".

>was this "b" a kind of a very
>short "w" which could dissapper between /e/ and /a/?
>The "dormie:bam" will explain the actualy "dormeam" and not "dormiam".

/b/ betweeen vowels became /B/ (bilabial fricative), which could be confused
with the phoneme /w/. This was one reason for the break down in the tense
system, as words such as amabit and amavit became indistinguishable. /w/
between vowels does vanish - at first between i-i, then between any two
similar vowels, then between any vowels (unless syncope has already removed
one of them).

peter