--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" wrote:
> Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>> "I mean, learning Dacian, where where /h/ is present, it wont
>> stop me to say "aprus" in Latin instead of "haprus" as in Dacian."
>
> Since the people who became romanised learned Latin, it seems the
> corect sentence is the one here:
>
> "I mean, learning Latin, where /h/ is not present, it wont stop
> me to say "haprus" in Dacian insteasd of "aprus" as in Latin."
Of course. But once the language used was no longer Dacian, the
/h/ couldn't have survived.
> Your stenence is correct for a Latin who learn Dacian, false for a
> Dacian who learn Latin.
Miguel's sentence _is_ for a latinophone learning Dacian (words).
> The Dacian won't stop to use in the new learned language its way
> to speak the words he still use.
Let's assume a first generation Dacian guy learning Latin and
expressing himself in the new language. Let's suppose that he has
to use some Dacian words because either his Latin is poor or there
is no clear matching Latin word. He uses -- say -- /haprus/ in a
conversation. He would have the surprise to find out that the other
one (if not Dacian himself, case in which they would use rather
their tongue at this incipient stage) will say simply /aprus/,
convinced he's done right. And that's because in Latin language
"h" had no longer a phonematical value. [Exactly this happened
for Greek transcription of Hebraic /?aleph/ as /alpha/, since
Greeks have no idea that /?/ was a phoneme]. Maybe the guy would
have some bad time and would sistematically use the pronunciation
he knows "correct" from Dacian even when speaking Latin, but two
or three generations after him, nobody would remember that since
in Latin, the phoneme /h/ had no lexical support (eventually using
the word /haprus/ once in a month in a conversation with other
Latin speaking guys is far from being a support for instating it
in local vernacular Latin).
Actually, for instating a phoneme in a language, one needs more
than a couple of low interest words: one needs a consistent bunch
of words, making it into the language and seldom used, containing
that phoneme. Romanian substrate does not meet this requirement,
either quantitatively or qualitatively; actually there is no clear
substratal word containing /h/ in Romanian, only a few question
marks around some unclear origin words containing it. They are by
no means enough used to be considered as the missing support for
instating a phoneme: most of them are rare regional words, only
"hoT" (`burglar`), "hãu" (`abyss`) and "a hãmesi" (`to starve`)
are currently used.
> I see it by myelf. The German use "merzedes" and I make usualy
> the same mistake speaking out "merc^edes" as in Romanian.
Are your children making the same mistake?!
> We have the Latin words without "h" and the substratual words
> with "h".
No substratal words have inherited /h/. G. Reichenkron did a bad
job by proposing lots of regional terms with initial /h/ as being
from substrate (his "Dacistic" etymologies were actually bad not
only for "h" words, but they were also SF in many other points).
The only "h" word having something to think about is "hãmesi" for
which there is an Albanian correspondent "hamës", though Albanian
word looks recent since one has /s/ instead of /S/. Thus there is
no serious support for Romanian having substratal words with /h/,
and judging by number of occurences of this phoneme in preserved
Dacian transcriptions, it was rather too rarely used to have a
real impact on PBR.
Marius Iacomi