On 2008-01-27 09:22, fournet.arnaud wrote:
> This statement is strange.
> I read Sardinian is the only dialect that keeps clear traces of
> short/long vowels.
> so LAtin must have settled on the island *before* the feature
> short/long was turned into open/close in LAte LAtin.
> I don't buy this late introduction of LAtin on Sardinia.
Sardinian simply merges long Latin vowels with their short counterparts,
which of course makes it an archaic outlier against the rest of Romance.
Perhaps we should speak of Sardino-Romance if the more usual merger of
i/e: > e vs. i: > i and e > E is regarded as Proto-Romance at least for
the front vowels. For the back ones, there are other languages showing
deviation from the "common Romance" pattern, cf. Romanian u/u: > u and
o/o: > o, just as in Sardinian. The qualities of /e:/ and /i/ etc. were
occasionally confused in some non-standard (Sabellic-influenced?)
varieties of Latin already in Classical times, but did not become
widespread before the 2nd century. Plenty of time for Sardinia to
prepare for separation.
Piotr