Re: ants was barb

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
> >
> > b <-> m is very common in Celtic and Ibero-Romance. How common is it elsewhere?
>
> Not very, to my knowledge. I think <hi:bernus> is regular, or at least I have not yet found a counter-example with an original heavy vowel before *-mr-.

Unless, that is, Pg. <inverno> and Sp. <invierno> 'winter' continue an archaic Latin *heimbernum, which was reduced to *heibernum in Roman Latin sometime after 200 BCE, when permanent colonization of the Iberian peninsula by Latin-speakers was established. This would be a peripheral archaism comparable to Pg. <cova> 'hollow of the hand', Sp. <cueva> 'cave' from arch. Lat. *cova, which was replaced by Rom. Lat. <cava>.

Alternatively, this proposed reduction might have followed monophthongization, *hi:mbernum > hi:bernum. Perhaps the process involved nasalization of the long vowel, *-i:mb- > *-i:~b- > -i:b-. Of course, without other examples, such an explanation is by definition ad hoc.

> Some of the Ibero-Romance examples are due to haplology of *ambi-b-, but offhand I do not know how far this explanation works.

Some reflexes of *ambosta < Celtic *ambi-bosta: 'that which one gets both hands around' begin with m-, and a handful of other words with m- for expected b- MAY have had prefixed *ambi-. Otherwise, we also have Latin loanwords in Basque during a particular interval of time undergoing b- > m- (probably because the closest thing to /b/ at the time in the borrowing dialects was [mb]; we have a similar phenomenon in Modern Greek borrowing of words with b-, since the native sound of beta is now [B]). Aragonese <mardano> 'pig' against bard-, barr- elsewhere might reflect borrowing from one of these Basque dialects at the right time.

DGK