On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 15:30:59 +0100, "alex_lycos" <
altamix@...>
wrote:
>Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>>>
>>> 1) Rom. Word "femeie" ( women) is givin as deriving from latin
>>> "famiglia" (family)
>>
>> That is correct
>
>
>to quote you here:
>
>"I had forgotten about Ita. serpe,
>which can perhaps be explained by loss of -n in Eastern Romance"
-n means "word final /n/".
>femina , lost of "n" - > femia > femeia
fé:mina could not have given femeie. The expected result would have
been *fámenã (if e. > ea > a applies to proparoxytones in -a), or
otherwise *fémenã.
The expected result for família is *famél^a > *fãméie, which is close
enough to actual feméie.
A note about accent patterns and their development in Romance.
As we saw previously, Latin had only a few possible accent types. The
main ones are:
A B
2 syllables: /-
3 syllables: -/- /--
4 syllables: --/- -/--
In words of more than two syllables, pattern A (paroxytone) applies if
the penultimate syllable is long, otherwise we have pattern B
(proparoxytone).
In Western Romance, the tendency was to eliminate proparoxytones, as
follows:
A B
2 syllables: /- -> /-
3 syllables: -/- /[-]- -> -/- /-
4 syllables: -[-]/- -/[-]- -> -/- -/-
A non-initial, non-final unstressed vowel was elided, leaving only
paroxytone stress patterns.
In Eastern Romance, the situation is more complex. In general,
unstressed non-final vowels were maintained _after_ the accent, but
were elided _before the accent (pattern 4A):
A B
2 syllables: /- -> /-
3 syllables: -/- /-- -> -/- /--
4 syllables: -[-]/- -/-- -> -/- -/--
Cf. Ita. dódici / Fre. douze, póllice / pouce, piédica / piège.
However, the tendency to eliminate unstressed non-initial, non-final
vowels in general had already started to work before the split between
Western and Eastern Romance, and in a number of cases the patterns /--
and -/-- had already been reduced to /- and -/-. This had happened
when the unstressed vowel occurred before an /l/ (oc(u)lu, auric(u)la,
tab(u)la), between /r/ or /l/ and a following /p/, /t/, /d/ or /m/
(vir(i)de, col(a)pu), or between /s/ and /t/ (pos(i)tu). In short,
when elimination of the vowel resulted in a consonant cluster which
already existed in the language (cl, bl, rd, lp, st in the examples
above).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...