IE-Semitic connections

Rick Mc Callister rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu
Sun Feb 7 03:39:24 UTC 1999


[snip]

>Latin /pt/ was assimilated to */tt/ very early in Iberian Romance, and
>there was no */ps/ stage.  The same thing happened in the ancestors of
>French and of Italian.  I have no data for southern Gallo-Romance, but I
>would be surprised if anything different happened here, since this kind
>of cluster assimilation seems to have been a very widespread feature of
>spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin).

The reason I was thinking about Gallo-Romance is that /pt/ remained. Even
though the /p/ has dropped out of Standard French, I've met people from
/sepcil/ <Sept Iles> Que'bec, so the fact that /pc/ still rears it ugly
little head in Canada means that it's something worth checking into.
Obviously /pt/ survived in France as late as the 1600s --or at least in
Brittany, where the que'bec,ois are said to hail from. I have no idea what
S. Gallo-Romance or Gascon have done with Latin /pt/.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
MUW
Columbus MS 39701
rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu



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