cebolla/tipula/kipula

[anthony.appleyard@umist.ac.uk]

On Thu, 14 Dec 2000 10:22:33 -0500, Rick Mc Callister
<rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> wrote:
> In Lapesa's Historia de la lengua española I came across
>Basque tipula, kipula "onion" < cepulla
>The Spanish form is cebolla

Another example of a Romance language, or a language taking words from a
Romance language, keeping hard K and G before front vowels, is Sardinian:
{kentu} = "100", {iskit} = "he knows" - and even {omne} = "all" whereas
every other Romance language that I know has a form derived from {totus}. In
the case of Sardinian, the island was likely too rocky and mostly goat
pasture to attract much mass Roman settlement, and the most Latin that the
Sardinians were likely exposed to was educated correct classical Latin of
appointed governers and suchline. Similar may have happened in the Basque
mountains, and the Basques when trying to understand what Romans were
saying, may most often have heard onions called by some educated Roman's
educated correct "kepulla" and not some ex-legionary settler's colloquial
"tsepolla".

I read somewhere that late Latin's habits of softening C and G, and shifting
short I and U to E and O, may be features of an Osco-Umbrian accent that
gradually pervaded all Latinity as the peoples of Italy mixed under the
Roman Empire.