Basque 'sei'

[Max Wheeler]

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> From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>

>>> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
>>> it's apical <s>.

> Miguel, does that mean that Gascon-Beárnais also had a laminal /s/ or just
> the apical one?

> And if so, were the two respesented as <z> (laminal) and <s> (apical) as is
> the convention in Euskera?

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Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
way back into the past.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
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