george knysh wrote:
> ****GK: Your hypothesis makes no sense to me. Why
> should Romanian rhotacism derive from Iranians when
> there is no sign of it in Slavic, which had far more
> intense relations with these tribes (up to the
> adoption of the "god" word) than the proto-Romanians?*****
Various kinds of "rhotacism" are known from a number of languages, and
their distribution in time and space shows them to be independent. PGmc.
*z > r in North and West Germanic (independently!) and intervocalic *s
*z > r in Latin. A similar change (*z^ > r) is known from several South
Slavic dialects (esp. Slovene). Coronal obstruents and laterals are
among the sounds most often affected by rhotacism (to understand how it
happens, observe the "tapping" or "flapping" of intervocalic /t/ and /d/
in North American and Australian Englishes). Initial and intervocalic
/d/ goes to /r/ (rhotacism) or to /l/ (lambdacism) in Neapolitan
dialects, and Neapolitan /l/ is often rhotacised as well. In Portuguese
and Galician, historical /l/ becomes /r/ in clusters (Port. branco,
obrigado, Gal. igrexa, praza, etc.), and some Brazilian varieties of
Portuguese rhotacise /l/ more generally (mal > mar), as do some dialects
of Spanish in syllable codas (the reverse change of r > l is also found
there). One could extend this list greatly with examples from non-IE
languages. We certainly need no Iranian influence to explain the change
in Romanian.
Piotr