> She: Mildred K. Pope. Her massive _From Latin to Modern
> French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman_ is
> getting a bit old now, but it's a standard reference.
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Arnaud
I have the book but I did not realize Kathryn most probably should
apply to a woman.
======
> no, I don't think that French sources are necessarily
> better; why on earth should they be?
======
Arnaud
Why should they not be, when it comes to French language itself ?
I am ready to believe that English native speakers do a better work
about English that French native speakers would do (about English).
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> >> The rest is regular: /ei/ > /Oi/ > /wE/ > /E/.
>
> > the change /we/ > /e/ is not regular.
>
> It is regular in the sense that it is a widespread variant
> of the more usual /wE/ > /wa/, not something unique to a few
> words, and moreover one that seems to have been regular in
> some varieties.
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Arnaud
It is definitely not widespread.
Maximum 5 to 10 words,
we > wa : scores of words.
I cut your quotes,
and I kept the part that weakens the influence of dialectal or foreign
influence upon the ultimate result we > e or we < wa :
> § 522. [wE] > [E].
> § 523. Fluctuations, however, continued throughout
> the seventeenth century and the pronunciation finally
> established was largely the outcome not so much of
> phonetic conditions as of the long drawn out conflict
> between the simplifying popular tendency and the
> conservatism of the grammarians.
>
> The [wa] pronunciation actually had a similar origin:
>
> § 525. [wE] > [wa]. -- In Late Middle French the modern
> lowered pronunciation [wa] made its appearance in vulgar
> speech, at first before [r].
=======
I have spent a long time yesterday evening reading ""HER"" work.
And I had not previously realized that /we/ actually cut in two
results in modern French :
- sometimes /e/ as in Français, or aimer-ais, aim-ais
- most often /wa/ in about all words.
I have come to believe this.
/we/ > /wa/ is the regular expected result.
In some words and in verbal paradigm, that is to say, when /we/ was
obviously a "morpheme" or a "bound-form", it simplified to /e/.
And my next idea is that /we/ came to be analysed as /w/+/e/
and /w/ was felt as a useless extra-morpheme and was discarded.
Compare :
Present : je parle (ground form)
Future : je parle-r-ai
Imparfait : je parl-W-ais
Conditional : je parle-r-W-ais
So what does this -W- stand here for ?
Nothing. It is useless and even confusing.
The rare cases like Français and Anglais when /e/ occurs instead of
/wa/ are also clearly motivated derivatives.
I don't think we need an Italian, foreign, north, east, south, west
influence of whatever sort.
The structure of morphemes has it that -w- is an intruding element
that is better removed than kept.
It's been great reading Mildred's work.
I learnt something yesterday.
Arnaud
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