Strictly speaking, the monophthongising
varieties of plebeian Latin didn't win the battle everywhere. Vulgar Latin
wasn't homogeneous any more than "rural" or "working-class" Englishes are now.
It was divided into a great number of dialects, often forming regional
convergence areas. For example, word-final -s was lost in the east and retained
in the west (including Sardinia and Northern Italy; it still survives in most
Ibero-Romance dialects). Most western dialects were affected by the lenition
(voicing/spirantisation and sometimes loss) of intervocalic -p-, -t-, -k-; in
the east these voiceless stops were by and large retained. The tendency to
palatalise velars before front vowels was strong in nearly all "Vulgar Latins",
but [ke] and [ge] survived in Sardinian and in Dalmatian. Whole dialectal areas
(most notably Afro-Latin) became extinct as Latin was replaced by other
languages.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2000 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] (unknown)
... Vulgar Latin, however, didn't always win the battle
: Rumanian, Rhaetish, Provencal and Portuguese all show examples of -au-
surviving in the dialect that was their source.