At 6:28:42 PM on Friday, October 31, 2008, Arnaud Fournet
wrote:
[...]
> And I suppose oui used to be /oi/ not /ui/ from hoc-illus
hoc ille
> > o-i > oui
What it used to be is irrelevant; are you going to claim
that it has three syllables because it once did?
In fact the consonantalization of the initial of <oui> was
already accepted by the 16th century grammarians, though
fluctuations between /wi/ and /ui/ continued into modern
French (Pope, ยง241).
Brian