--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
>
>
> tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> I don't think so. The relationship in English between native /w/
and
> French /v/ was codified a long time ago, when the English nobility
> decided to give up France and decided to make peace with the
natives
> at home. They had therefore been immunized, so to speak, by the
time
> the elites of Europe decided French /v/ was cool.
>
>
> -- Please see my reply to Piotr Gasiorowski's answer to this
comment. But what you say seems to suggest to me that you consider
the predominance of /v/ in Europe to be due to imitation of French?
It wasn't an independent phenomenon in these languages, as in
Sanskrit (albeit not a fully fricative /v/), or as probably also
occurred in languages like Finnish or Hungarian or Turkish (based on
what I have read of these languages, the evidence suggests that
their /v/'s, at least in initial position, probably came from
earlier /w/)? Are Russian and Albanian /v/ also due to imitation of
French?
>
I think it was a whole package, including /v/ for /w/, and
uvular /R/ for apical /r/ that spread as a sign of cultured
behaviour, from French. But some of the developments are older than
the 18th century. Some high variants of 19th century Russian even
had /R/, from what I read.
Torsten