[gothic-l] Re: The Praeneste fibula

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Padraic Brown <pbrown at polaris.umuc.edu> wrote:-
> The philological suspicion seems to be the reduplicated perfect of
> facere.

Praeneste is not Rome, and Praeneste Latin had dialect differences from Roman
Latin, same as there were dialects in Ancient Greek. E.g. a Roman author
described one Praeneste dialect verb:-

> "tongere" nosse est, ut Praenestini dicunt "tongitionem" pro notionem.

(I read that Praeneste is now called Palestrina.) One such difference may have
been persistence of reduplicated perfects where Roman (and also Germanic in
its preterite, which is derived from the IE perfect) dropped the second
occurrence of the reduplicated constant with contraction.

> ... The fh seems strange to me, though, ...

The Roman alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. "F" was derived from
the Greek digamma and originally was pronounced "w". Then they wrote "f" as
"wh", because there was no letter for the "f" sound before, and that started
Romans etc at using digamma for the "f" sound.


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