Re: Lexeme-lumping in REW 878, baf(f)a

dgkilday57 scripsit:

> What's clear even without special knowledge is that the division
> between Sardo-Sicilian and Continental Western Romance is deep and
> old.

Sardinian is generally thought to have split from Latin around the 1st
century B.C.E.

As for Sicilian, it is a mess of layer upon layer of various kinds of
Romance, and it's even possible that there is simply no continuity
at all back to Latin times. In any case, I don't believe that its
5-vowel system represents a simple loss of length, as is the case for
Sardinian.

> Not only does S-S have the 5-vowel system and the retroflex, it
> merges the Latin 3rd conjugation into the 2nd,

It's not surprising that if you merge /e:/ and /e/, you wind up with
only one /e/-conjugation, and the 2nd is far more regular and (I think)
more populous than the 3rd.

> and it uses the reflex of L. <habeo:> as a _preposed_ future auxiliary.
> In CWR, of course, the auxiliary was _postposed_, leading to cliticism
> and fusion. This indicates that Sardo-Sicilian Latin had already
> adopted SVO as the neutral word-order when it normalized <habeo:>
> as the future auxiliary, while the Latin which became CWR was still SOV.

I don't know that that argument is necessarily sound. In North Germanic
the articles wound up postposed as opposed to preposed in West Germanic,
but there was no corresponding shift from AN to NA order.

--
Possession is said to be nine points of the law, John Cowan
but that's not saying how many points the law might have. cowan@...
--Thomas A. Cowan (law professor and my father)