Return of the minimal pairs

[Douglas G Kilday]

Eduard Selleslagh (15 Jun 2001) wrote:

[DGK, 8 Jun 2001]

>> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
>> <via>: "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam"
>> (R.R. I.2.14).

>[Ed]

>That's really interesting. Were those 'rustici' making the link with
>'vehere/vehiculum'? (in which case it would be an archaism, true or false).

I'm not sure, but I suspect the post-tonic intervocalic /h/ was a
requirement of the rustic dialect, not a popular archaism. David Salmon (5
Jun 2001) has described the /h/ in <vehicle> as "simply a Southernism,
necessary to the drawl". Similarly, <yee-ha!> appears to be the drawled form
of <yay!> from the affirmative adverb <yea>.

In Latin, non-etymological /h/ occurs also in <ahe:neus> for <ae:neus> 'made
of brass, etc.', the cognomen Ahala (<a:la> 'wing'), and <vehemens> for
<ve:mens> 'mindless'. The forms with /h/ could all be drawled rusticisms.
Umbrian has <Nahar> for the river <Na:r>, so the presumed rustic drawl might
be a relic of p-Italic substrate in rustic Latin, like the /f:h/
alternation.

>The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest
>of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about
>'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking
>Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another
>common thing anywhere.

I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess
that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges
between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a
different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect
what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I]
in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A
parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for
<breeches> and "crick" for <creek>.

DGK