From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61925
Date: 2008-12-06
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
> Borrowed ??
> Old French porposer, consirer, eriter
> These words are not borrowed,
> They have been graphically retro-latinified by the orthographic purist
> tradition,
> this has nothing to do borrowing.
Relatinisation has lengthened _consirer_ to _considérer_ - one extra
syllable. Do you concede that _probable_ is borrowed?
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the ending -able is a retro-latinification of a native -avle, -evle
I've seen old texts with that suffix.
I think the case of French vis-à-vis Latin very much looks like the case of
Hindi versus Sanscrit and Russian versus Slavonic.
It hardly makes sense to speak of borrowing,
because those languages have never stop being in written contact with the
previous fossilised state of language.
English has borrowings from Latin
because it's not a Latin language.
How do you caracterize a Latin "borrowing" in French ?
The old dichotomy between mot savant and mot populaire is not so much
convincing
because you have plenty of intermediary cases.
A.
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If _eriter_ is inherited, where does the intervocalic /t/ come from?
Ancestral Latin *t would have dropped.
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I don't know,
I suppose the suffix -ter existed in OF
and this word may be a recreation ?
Anyway this word has a kind of lawmaking feature
that makes it a half written half oral word.
A.
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As to _proposer_ (did the OF indeed have surd-preserving metathesis?),
that would go back to *pro:pausa:re, which did not come from Rome.
Richard.
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OF is porposer.
I suppose English purpose may be from that.
I don't really understand what you want to say.
A.