Distance in change

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Frank Rossi" <iglesias at axia.it> wrote:

>Facts:
>a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three
>"aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh).

>[...]

>d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k).

But for an analysis of the system as a whole, it's not
unimportant to add that Italian also has b, d, g; pp, tt, kk and
bb, dd, gg...  Etruscan *only* had p, t, k and ph, th, kh.

>e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of
>intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph,
>th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting
>that the Tuscans are Gaels!).

In fact, I did compare the gorgia to the Goidelic mutations
somewhere recently (Romanesco, on the other hand, has Brythonic
mutations: la hasa / la gasa).

>f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent
>dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects
>exhibits the same kind of phenomenon.

>Opinions:
>a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani,
>Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have
>had too much of an effect on local Italian".

Well it could have, but not more than a millennium after its
death.

>b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni,
>Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed
>effect) substrate phenomenon.

>Further considerations:
>- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to
>the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans
>("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant.

>[...]

>All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for
>etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa".

That's the only hope the Etruscan substrate theory has: that the
gorgia went unnoticed and unwritten for over a millennium (maybe
in remote illiterate areas of Tuscany?) until it became
fashionable in the Tuscan cities, sometime around 1500...  I must
say I find that hard to believe.  Rohlfs also objects that the
Corsican dialects show no trace of the gorgia, despite the
(physical, not literary) Tuscan influence on Corsican.

>According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in
>the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat
>(which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena
>of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be
>observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area
>clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition.

>This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by
>Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos",
>where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect.

And I don't really believe it either for Aragonese (and Catalan).
Sure, some Oscan (Osca = Huesca) and Umbrian colonists were
present in the area, but I guess they were all over the Empire.
The change mb > mm, nd > nn is natural enough for it to have
taken place independently.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam