la leche (was: Re: txakur/dzhagaru/cachorro..)..

[Gabor Sandi]

>From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
>Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 22:59:27 +0000

[ moderator snip ]

>I'm no specialist either (Germanic philology is my thing, at least
>officially).  But my Latin dictionary (an old Cassell's from the 1930s) lists
>only _lac_, not _lacte_.  Still, it is conceivable that _lacte_ arose in
>Vulgar Latin, and it would be a perfectly good ancestor of _leche_ et al.

Although I am no specialist either, I do have a life-long interest in
Romance linguistics, so let me share my thoughts on this topic:

1. I think that the main reason for Latin neuter nouns turning into
masculines in the Romance languages is that in the singular, neuter
adjectives of the -o declension (by far the most common) were identical to
their masculine counterparts in all cases except the nominative even in
Classical Latin:

Nom.  bonus  bonum
Acc.     bonum
Gen.     boni
Dat.     bono
Abl.     bono

Once phonetic attrition (loss of final d) achieved the same for the definite
article-to-be ille (ille/*illu *illu illi illo illo), the general impression
must have been that masculine and neuter nouns mostly take the same
qualifiers and are replaced by the same pronouns, therefore they must belong
to the same category. The loss of final -s in the precursors of Italian and
Romanian must have reinforced this trend in eastern dialects, since then the
nominative also became identical: *bonu.

2. The word "lac" must have been felt to be an isolate in the language.
Correct me if I am wrong, but no other noun with final -c survived into
Vulgar Latin. It would have been natural for the nominative/accusative
singular to be re-formed based on the genitive lactis, especially because of
analogy with the similar-sounding nox/noctis, replaced in Vulgar Latin by
*noctis/noctis.

3. To continue this trend of thought, the fact that lac became feminine
leche in Spanish is not so much a matter of a neuter noun becoming feminine.
Instead, we should see it as one of several examples of masculine nouns of
the Latin third declension becoming feminine (and vice versa?). Leche, sal,
sangre, flor are feminine in Spanish; fleur, dent and mer are feminine in
French; ponte is feminine in Portuguese. With dictionaries and some time on
my hands I am sure I could provide more examples. What I cannot provide is a
reason: analogy, semantic associations, sub- or superstratum influence? Any
thoughts by real experts?

4. On corpus and tempus, we should remember that the final -s in these two
words was very resilient in those dialects of Vulgar Latin that kept
word-final -s. Old Spanish still had cuerpos and tiempos in the singular for
these words (masculine of course), although the language eventually left off
the final s through analogy with all other nouns. And Old French had an -s
in these words in both the cas sujet and cas rigime in the singular, still
kept today in the orthography (corps, temps), and even in speech if we
consider the nouns in expressions like "de temps en temps" as in the
singular.

Best wishes to all,
Gabor