At 3:07:23 PM on Sunday, December 7, 2003, Miguel Carrasquer
wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 17:09:24 +0000, Richard Wordingham
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer
>><mcv@...> wrote:
>>> Latin had no /h/ (it lost it very early on). Therefore,
>>> no native Romanian words have /h/, and no substrate
>>> /h/'s would have survived among a Romanized population.
>>Does that follow? Where do Scots <-lz-> and <-nz->
>>(originally palatalised) come from?
> Never heard of them. Can you give some examples?
I'm guessing that Richard is thinking of things like the
surname <Menzies>, now /'miN@.../ or the like, but formerly
with palatalized nasal. It appears earlier in such forms as
<Meignees> 1421, <Menyhes> 1428, <Megnies> 1447, <Meigneis>
1448, and <Mengyeis> 1591, among many others. According to
Black it's originally Norman <de Meyners>, from Mesnières in
France; he isn't always reliable in his etymologies, but he
does give an instance of the same person appearing both as
<de Meyneris> and as <(de?) Meinzeis> temp. Robert I, and
in Gaelic the most famous family of this name are <Na
Mèinnearaich>, so in this case I'm inclined to trust him.
The use of <z> to indicate the palatalization is easily
explained: it was originally a yogh (<3>) with value [j].
Brian