From: tgpedersen
Message: 48763
Date: 2007-05-29
> >>> Is g- > h- regular in Lat. germanus > Sp. hermano, andI thought something like this: the Germani might have called
> >>> if not, what happened? And how about Pt. irmão (e > i)?
>
> >>> It's not regular. Latin geminus > Portuguese ge^meo;
> >>> Latin generalis > Portuguese geral. The anomalous shift
> >>> could be explained as influenced by phrasal lenition:
> >>> teu germanu > *teu yermanu
>
> >> Given the etymogies Piotr mentioned, are your sure your
> >> etymologies are not learned loans from Latin?
>
> > My impression is that Portuguese generally retained the
> > glide in unstressed initial syllables and hardened it into
> > /z^/, which is what one sees in Port. joelho : Sp. hinojos
> > (< genuc(u)lum 'knee'), Port. giesta : Sp. hiniesta (<
> > genistam 'broom plant'). But I'm not sure about the
> > details and the relevant literature is out of my easy
> > reach at the moment. I may be missing something, but
> > either João is right about phrasal effects, or perhaps
> > irmão has been influenced by a Castilian-type dialect.
>
> Edwin B. Williams, _From Latin to Portuguese_, says that
> Latin initial /g/ followed by a non-low front vowel became
> VL [j] and Ptg. <g> [z^]; he gives the sequence of changes
> as [g] > [gj] > [j] > [dz^] > [z^]. He adds that
> <germa:num> seems to have developed regularly at first,
> citing <germão> 1282 and <germaho> 1288, and notes that the
> loss of <g> 'has been attributed to its intervocalic
> position in the frequent occurrence of <germão> and <germãa>
> with possessive adjectives'; it's an old suggestion, as for
> this he cites Gröber, _Grundriss der romanischen
> Philologie_.
>
> By the way, Penny's little history of Spanish says that OSp
> had <ermano>, the <h-> being a later addition.
>
>
> As personal name, we can read Germa~o until XVIIth century.
>