On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 15:10:45 +0000, tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
>> >Yes, but why <x>?
>>
>> Isn't it obvious?
>
>I assume it's obvious to someone with Iberian connections, with
>Portuguese, Old Spanish, Basque, Old French, Catalan all agreeing to
>use <x> for /s^/, but to me it seems that for <x> to be used that
>way, it must once have stood for what it stood for in Latin,
>namely /ks/.
>
>And let's not forget that the Aquitanian glosses are _before_ that
>Western Romance tradition of using <x> for /s^/, so you can't invoke
>the latter as proof.
I wasn't. The use of <x> for /s^/ is much later, after Latin /ks/ had
evolved to /(j)s^/ in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan (not in Occitan or
French, however). It has nothing to do with Aquitanian.
>>What other letter in the Latin alphabet would you choose?
>
>What's wrong with <z>?
For starters, it's not in the Latin alphabet. It was only added by
imperial decree in the first century AD (together with Y) to write Greek
borrowings, and this had very little impact indeed on Latin writing in
remote Aquitania. Only much later was the letter used, in (mainly Italian)
inscriptions, to render assibilated native /dj/ (zebus = diebus at Ostia),
although one also finds, conversely, baptidiare for the Graecism baptizare.
It was never used to write voiceless phonemes.
When the Aquitanians, who wrote only in Latin, needed to write proper names
containing their native Aquitanian sibilants /s/, /s'/, /c/, /c'/ (perhaps
also /s^/, /c^/), the only letters at their disposal were <s> and <x>.
There was a tendency to use <x> to write the affricates /c/ and /c'/, but
there never emerged a consistent transcription system. The problem
probably solved itself once more and more Aquitanians had adopted Latin
names.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...