--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> > >
> > > Like Londres for London? Always wondered about that one, or why
> > > the Spaniards picked it up.
> >
> > I don't know, but it's old: <Lundres> is found in Old French
> > as early as the 12th century.
>
> I would bet on the dissimilation *lund-nes > lund-res. I cannot
> think of another case, right now, but I remember other cases of n
> r exist.
"The Romance forms of London testify to initial stress in the name
at the time of borrowing, as in Londres, Londra. Falc'hun (1981: 298-
9) perversely explains these as due to variable stress-position in
Celtic; surely they are borrowings of some such later Old English
form as Lundene, and do not go back directly to Brittonic, or even to
Latin, at all. The vowel-lowering and the consonant-dissimilation
are explicable entirely within Romance. London is Lo(u)ndres in
Anglo-Norman (AN). This indicates that late OE /lu(:)n-/ (on the
vowel-shortening see note 4) was unsurprisingly rendered as /lun-/.
Old French (OF) /ou/ became /u/ in the eleventh century (cf. Pope
1934: §1085 (i) ) and generated inverse spellings. AN /u/ often
corresponds to Central French /o/, and an AN form in /un/ would have
been Parisianized as /on/ and therefore spelt <on>; the influence of
this can be seen in the alternative AN spelling without <u>. The
dissimilation /n...n/ > /n...r/ is noted as part of a more general
OF consonantal phenomenon by Pope (1934: §643 (i) ). Spanish Londres
and Italian Londra derive from the Parisian French form" (Richard
Coates, "A New Explanation of the Name of London," _Transactions of
the Philological Society_ 96 [2002], p. 206, n. 2).
Regards,
Francesco