--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:
>
> How and why did the prothetic e- arise in French,
> Spanish, etc.?
> In Italian it exists as the phenomenon of "s impuro"
> where you use lo before /sC/.
> Was Romance /s/ apical? Would that have caused the
> need of a prothetic vowel?
> Why /e-/ and not some other vowel?
C.H. Grandgent, _An Introduction to Vulgar Latin_ (1907), pp. 97-8,
says "S before a consonant was doubtless long and sharp, as in modern
Italian, so that at the beginning of a word it had a syllabic
effect ... This led to the prefixing of a front vowel (until the
seventh century nearly always an _i_, later often _e_) to the _s_
when no vowel preceded ...". He cites <iscolasticus> (Barcelona, 2nd
cent.) as probably the earliest example in a Latin inscription.
Other examples are <istatuam>, <istudio>, <istipendium>,
<ispose> 'sponsae'.
Douglas G. Kilday