Re: [tied] Re: Mercury and lead

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001 09:24:05 -0000, tgpedersen@... wrote:

>French has lost its -s's, and it is reasonable to assume it went the
>usual path s -> s^ -> h -> nothing, along which path Portuguese (and
>Andalusian and South American) has travelled some of way, so at least
>at some time x stood for (or at least was read as) s^?

I'm not sure [s^] is a necessary step on the way from /s/ to /h/, but
even if it was the way actually taken by French, it would mean that
*all* cases of syllable final /s/ were pronounced [s^] at some time,
including the vast majority of them which were written with <s>, not
<x>.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...