Re: Erosion of Latin -us into Romance (was: Nominative Loss. A stre

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

>
> Richard:
> > So, Glen, I don't understand your point.
>
> Just that a loss of *-r in daughter languages at the end
> of *pxte:r may not be a simple sound change but rather based
> on the morphological or even sandhi context which in some way
> favoured this loss despite its expected preservation based on
> our knowledge of sound changes alone. It was in response
> to Jens' question of "where else do you find such a loss?"
> to support his **pxte: idea.
>
> Well, that's an unfair question. It's what we see afterall
> whether we reconstruct *pxte:r, or *pxte: < *pxte:r -- We
> still ultimately need *pxte:r and so such a loss MUST
> have taken place. So, why am I being questioned for that
> bit of common sense.

So I take it your more immediate point was that the loss of -s in the
Latin nominative singular in the development of Western Romance from
Latin resulted from the total collapse of the case system in the noun
rather than purely from phonetic changes. What you were looking for
were anomalous survivals such as, in French, _fils_ 'son' ( > English
_Fitz-_) and possibly the proper nouns _Charles_ and _Jacques_.

Richard.