Rum. sce/sci > $te/$ti [Re: -ishte, -eshte]

From: George
Message: 15378
Date: 2002-09-11

>[Moeller] yeap. And what does mean "stei" in your
>sub-dialectus? How does happen that even for this word, for
>stei in your region you dont use shtei. You should do it after
>your rule. Don't you?

Not at all: "stei" is /stey/ and basta. And, according to
"the rule", "scl-" > "schi-" and "$chi-". Hence the further
derivation > "$t-". That's why this rule cannot apply to "stei"
(which is nothing more nor less than a variant of "stean" and
of "stanã"). Whereas $chei (along with the peculiar $tei) is a
toponym. The information contained in this name: "place of
Slavs" (where they once lived; or: settlement founded by them).

>[Moeller]hmmmm "s" becam "sh" before "t" just when "t"
>fallowed by e and i.

No! Only when s + ce & s + ci, *and* ce/ci already = [t$e/t$i],
only then you can get > $t.

If you say "$cii române$ce?" "e$ci din Bucure$ci?", the pronounciation
is very close to "$tii române$te?" "e$ti din Bucure$ti?". Today, only
the Romanian subdialects in the province of Banat (incl. Northern
Serbia), that of neighboring Mehedintzi (Western Oltenia) and a
region of central-northern Transylvania, roughly the Gherla &
Bistritza-Nãsãud area, maintain "ce/ci", where the rest of native-
speakers either use /t/ or /k'/. The Banat and Mehedintzi people
even preserve this funny sounding "-e$ce", that seems somehow
archaic.

BUT: I am not sure that their "$ce/$ci" is the old pronunciation,
a... "frozen" one. It could be that initially it was a "$te/$ti", with
a "mollis"-t, as it has been in the rest of the greater subdialect
of the Transylvanian kind, and that this sound > /t$/. Because
in most occasions they make of "te", "de" > "ce", "ge" /t$e + d3e/.
(Moreover: I encountered Hungarian native speakers who had the
same phonetics here.)

So, I don't dare say these dialectal occurrences are living fossils.
But they illustrate that those transformation rules are not only
plausible, they really apply until today (the process is still active).

>I cannot find a word now where st
>fallowed by o, u, a got a sht in romanian Do you?

You find something like that too. But seldom (rather dialectal).
And in loanwords having that $t in the original form.

>[Moeller] hmmm.. I try to make a connection. When you say in
>joke using foreign word romanian you will use the romanian
>sufixes

This happens only if you choose to make of those words
Romanian verbs of the fourth category, with the infinitival
ending "-i" (i.e. in the "long infinitive": "-ire"). I repeat (for
the X-th time), in this case the Indicative & Subjunctive
Present has the endings: "-esc, -e$ti, -e(ste), -im, -itzi, -e(sc)".

You may choose words from Mandarin and Cantonese, from
Kishuaheli and Araucanese: if you put them in the "-ire" verb,
then you'll automatically add (even not knowing what a "verb" is)
attach the endings "-esc, -e$ti" et cetera.

(There's a tendency for many new-fangled verbs of this kind
to have an "auxiliary" -u-: "-uire; -uesc, -ue$te...". And a
"legatto-i" after the -u-: "-uiesc, -uie$te" /uyesk, uyeSte/,
due to the orthogr. reform of 1954, that paid a tribute to
uneducated fellas who pronounced that semivowel /y/ where
it had been ill at place. But that's how languages forever change...

So, the correct spelling had been until April 1954: "trebue(ste),
contribue, constitue" etc., and, since Apr. 1954, it has been
"trebuie(ste), contribuie, constituie" etc. (the latter two aren't
tipical for adding that -u-, since their one belongs to the radix,
but be it now - for my ad-hoc examples that'll do :)

>It shows from these example that a population when "loan"
>words adaptate these loans to its own way to speak.

But its own way is strongly based on patterns that are fixed
in the mind. No chaos there, but rules that one learns as soon
as one learns the mother tongue, without being told: "Look,
this is a substantive, this is the accusative, this is a verb, this
is the present time, that is the past participle."

>[Moeller] I dont put any dacian words here.

But you're attracted by the idea that Romanian words deemed
as derivations of Latin words actually evolved from the substrate.
Hence, you're up to re-analyse their etymology seeing how the
other trip might have been, from PIE via Dacian (?), Thracian (?)
then via Proto-Romanian to Romanian. So, I was asking what
would you (or your author) propose for "greu", if you doubt the
link to Lat. "grauis"?

George