--- In cybalist@..., alexmoeller@... wrote:
>
> I am sure you did not lost my example with de$t versus de$tept
> and I should like to see some another example from latin there
> where in romanian igi/ege falloved by "s" created an "$" in
> romanian.
*de-excitu > de$tept:
-xct- would be rather a mouthful with hard 'c'; -xçt- does not sound
Romance at all. Latin 'x' before consonants tended to simplify, so I
would expect -xc- > -sc-. We have already discussed Latin 'sc' before
front vowels; in this environment we would get $t-. I am not going to
discuss the vowels, because that is beyond the limits of my knowledge,
but their evolution looks quite plausible. There is thus no
difficulty in a development
*de-excitu > *de$tetu
I don't know where the 'p' comes from. One could imagine metathesis,
thus
*de-excitu > *dexictu > *de??eptu
but it seems rather forced. If it did happen, then the two forms
could blend to yield de$teptu.
I can imagine that there would be a strong temptation to simplify
*de$tetu to *de$tu. Inserting a 'p' would resist this temptation.
But where would the 'p' come from? I can offer several _wild_
guesses:
A. Metathesis of the original form, thus
*de-excitu > *dexictu > *de??-eptu
but it seems rather forced. If it did happen, then the two forms
could blend to yield de$teptu.
B. Some sort of analogy, or perhaps to make it look like a past
participle.
A similar think has happened in English. The person-noun formed from
'passage' should be *passager. To keep 's' and g' better apart, an
'n' was inserted, yielding 'passenger'. Exactly the same thing
happened to derive 'messenger' from 'message'.
Would any list members care to offer constructive comments?
> For "official " informations:
> the latin rules of romanian says that latin ge/gi has no
> transformation but gW and kW has some transformations.
To be precise, Romanian spelling is designed to avoid having to show
the transformations.
> And to show you an example we have the romanian word :
> "mers"= walk with the verb at infinitiv = a merge= to walk
> which is suposed to come from latin "mergere". Latin mergere=
> to submerge
1. The past participle was 'mersus' (acc. 'mersum') in Classical
Latin, so any questions about this form are a Latin, not a
specifically Romance issue.
2. There is no vowel before the 'ge' in 'merge', so there is no
comparison to be made.
> "drege" infinitiv = a drege= to repair which is supposed to
> come from latin dirigire= tomake right( in this case at least
> the semantism is almost the same)
3. Mostly the pattern is not -'egVCV, so I am not surprised if there
is little or no reduction to -'egCV. (' = stress.)
> lege= lat lex, legis= law.
> how you see , no transformation of "ge/gi".
4. As point 3.
I can't think of any other Romanian examples where I would expect ge >
$. However, does Latin fri:gidu- 'cold' survive in Romanian? The
vowels are not quite the same as in Latin digitu- 'finger', so there
may well be some differences. Another possibility is Latin rigidu-
'stiff', but I would expect that to be *reged if it survives. Both
these examples would be invalidated if Latin 'd' were dropped between
vowels in Romanian.
Richard.