--- In
mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:
> And then there's mucho < multus, also regional and other
> Ibero-Romance muncho and Portuguese muito /mwËœitu/.
> So, what happened here. Did Spanish get muy from Medieval
> Astur-Galaico, leaving mucho as the natural development?
According to Penny, <muyt>, later <muy> is the regular outcome of
MULT(U) with final T, while <mucho> is the regular outcome when
the T remains syllable-initial. (I said this before, though I don’t
believe that I mentioned my specific source.) Penny’s book is
concerned with the main lines of development leading to the main
more or less standard modern varieties of present-day Spanish and
doesn’t deal with
other Iberian varieties.
Edwin B. Williams, From Latin to Portuguese, says that the Portuguese
apocopated form <mui> from <muito> is the result of Spanish influence
and tentatively attributes the <ui> of <muito> (instead of the *muto
that would be regularly expected) to the influence of the apocopated
form. He doesn’t mention <muncho>, but he does note a popular form
<munto> from <muito>; this seems to have developed by analogy with
words like bento < BENEDICTU(M) and pente < PECTINE(M), in which the
/y/ of /yt/ became nasalized, a consonantal /n/ developed, and the
/y/ fell.
Brian