Re: Latin c- > Romance g-, any explanation?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> ________________________________
> From: Tavi <oalexandre@...>
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sunday, April 8, 2012 5:41 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Latin c- > Romance g-, any explanation?
>  
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Marco Moretti" <marcomoretti69@> wrote:
> >
> > > Is there any explanation for the trend *c->g- present in some Romance words?
> > > 1- Latin cattus > Romance *gattu > Portuguese gato
> > > 2- Latin crupta (<crypta) > *grupta > Portuguese gruta
> > > 3- Latina crassa > *grassa > Portuguese graxa
> > >
> > > Joao SL
> >
> > Something similar is found extensively in Romance languages and
> > also in Italian:
> >
> > Latin /cattus/ > Italian /gatto/
> > Latin /crassus/ > Italian /grasso/
> > Latin /crupta/ > Italian /grotta/
> > Latin /cavea/ > Italian /gabbia/
> >
> > and also /pr-/ sometimes > /br-/
> >
> > Latin /prui:na/ > Italian /brina/
> > Latin /pra:vus/ > Italian /bravo/ (with semantic
> > shift "cruel", "fierce" > "brave" > "able", and cfr. also the old
> > meaning of "hired assassin").
> >
> > Perhaps ancient dialectal variants?
> >
> IMHO this is due to substrate influence on Vulgar Latin. In languages which had a tense/lax contrast on plosives rather than voiceless/voiced one, Latin voiceless plosives would have been assimilated to the native lax ones. This has happened, for example, in Latin loanwords to Basque (e.g. castellu- > gaztelu).
>
> This lenition process has actually happened to INTERVOCALIC stops in Western Romance, and has been explained (see for example A. Martinet: Economie des changements phonétiques, 1955) by a Celtic substratum. However, in these languages Latin voiceless plosives have been kept at word initial in most cases. This could be explained assuming they were realized as tense like intervocallic geminates (in fact, this is what happened to the rhotic r-, which is throughly pronounced as [r:]).
>
> ***R
> Yet *grassu- seems to be the exception and, curiously, is (about) the only example found in French of /k-/ > /g-/ that I can think of, compare to French chat, cave, crypte (there is also grotte < ? Italian). France definitely had a Celtic substrate, so why doesn't French follow Spanish, Italian and Portuguese?

Some French words derived from Greek also have anlaut-voicing. The only example I can think of offhand is <galoche> 'galosh' from Middle Greek *kalo'poda (acc.) 'wooden shoe'. The best explanation of *grassu- is a Vulgar Latin cross between <crassus> and <grossus>, yielding *grassus which did not spread to the NW extremity of the Empire, hence dialects of NW France reflect *crassu-.

A more serious objection to Tavi's simple explanation is that N Italy also had a Celtic substratum; Mediolanum/Milan is a Gaulish name, but Milanese has borrowed Fr. <cabaret>, <cabriolet> as <gabare'>, <gabriole'>. Also, as I have already discussed with Tavi, there is stratification of Latin loanwords in Basque; we have <katu> 'cat' beside <gaztelu>, for example.

No single mechanism explains all examples of anlaut-voicing. Sandhi, which Brian mentioned, to my knowledge can be demonstrated only for a small set of nouns in Ibero-Romance. The six words in Marco's list all have different explanations. The one for <brina> is mine, but the margin is too small to contain it. If my home computer gives me several hours without crashing, I will get the details posted in a few more days.

DGK