Or maybe it was later pronounced "phonetically" by Romance speakers. We have such examples in English e.g. the <t> of often is often pronounced and it often annoys me. In Spanish, women tend to pronounce and write a <p> for setiembre as septiembre when historically, it was always pronounced without the /p/.
From: Joao S. Lopes <josimo70@...>
To: "cybalist@yahoogroups.com" <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 23, 2011 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Latin -bs : just written or phonetic?
Maybe the conscience of preffix ab- helped to keep the B in abs-.
JS Lopes
De: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@...>
Para: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Enviadas: Sábado, 23 de Julho de 2011 15:48
Assunto: [tied] Re: Latin -bs : just written or phonetic?
--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> Evidently, Latin was like German and Russian and pronounced all final syllables unvoiced.
Wasn't final <d> v. final <t> the reflection of a phonetic distinction? At some stage we seem to have final V:d > V: (attested in writing, notably for the ablative singular) but final V:t > Vt (3s of verbs).
The word-internal assimilations -bs- > -ps- and -bt- > -pt- aren't always shown in writing.
Another curiosity is the non-assimilation in the prefix abs-. Perhaps the Romans were happy with the rule <bs> = /ps/.
Richard.