s > r (Romance)

[Alan R. King]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel Carrasquer writes:
 
>It's hard to see -s- > -z- separate from -p-, -t-, -k- > -b-, -d-,
>-g-, which must mean that the change was general in most Western
>Romance, but did not occur in Eastern Romance (S. Italian and
>Romanian).
 
In Standard Italian intervocalic stops are (mostly) not voiced, but -s- >
-z- has taken place.  I would have guessed (from my position of overall
ignorance about the Italian dialects) that this probably also reflected
roughly the situation in dialectal Italian south of the Spezia-Rimini line
(north of the line, -s- is also voiced, of course, but so are the stops).
Doesn't this establish a precedent clearly opposed to assuming (in the
absence of further data, I mean) that other Romance dialects which didn't
lenite the stops couldn't have lenited -s-?  I would have thought so.
 
It is easy enough to see why the (apparent or real) parallel between
voicing of intervocalic stops, on the one hand, and of -s-, on the other,
suggest the conclusion that a single sound-change event is involved, rather
than two separate phenomena, but that is surely not a foregone conclusion a
priori?  Among non-Romance languages in which regular voicing of (some)
intervocalic consonants has occurred, I believe there are cases of voicing
of stops but not of -s-, and of course there are languages with the
opposite, voicing of -s- but not of stops (e.g. Old English).
 
An example of the former combination may be Welsh in its development from
proto-Celtic via proto-Brittonic.  Intervocalic stops were voiced, as I
remarked in my previous post and is anyway well known.  Intervocalic s was
in general aspirated, never voiced.  My doubt is as to which happened
first.  If s aspirated first, it could then be argued that the reason why s
wasn't voiced together with the stops is that at the time the stops were
voiced, there were no intervocalic sibiliants around (only h's).  Even if
the Welsh example is dubious (as I said, that would seem to depend on the
relative chronology of the voicing of stops and aspiration of -s-), perhaps
there are  examples in other languages?
 
Coming back to Romance, though, and getting somewhat aprioristic myself, I
would have thought that a weightier factor capable, potentially, of
influencing the way -s- developed into -z-, would be, not what happened
with the intervocalic stops, but what happened with *geminate* consonants
in general, or at any rate with -ss- in particular.  I'm thinking now in
terms of structural economy.  In dialects where geminates were simplified,
non-geminate -s- either had to evolve to -z- (or at least to something
other than -s-) or else be confused with -ss- > -s-.  Where, on the other
hand, geminates are maintained, there can have been no such pressure.
 
The same argument applies, of course, to the lenition of intervocalic
voiceless stops.  Thus, if such principles of structural economy operate,
we would indeed expect -s- and voiceless stops to voice in the same
dialects and in the same contexts, unless other factors intervened to
differentiate, because both developments would have been responses to
similar pressures.
 
But that *is* aprioristic.  Returning to facts, isn't Italian a
counter-example?
 
Alan