s > z (etc.) (Italy, Spain)

[Thomas D. Cravens]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Comments below (Tom Cravens)
 
(Note: I [TC] mistakenly sent this directly to Miguel, rather than the list.
Perhaps the discussion of weakening by class is of some general interest.)
 
At 04:26 PM 11/13/98 EST, you wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>"Alan R. King" <mccay at redestb.es> wrote:
>
>>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).
>
>It's not that simple.  Standard Italian has plenty of cases of voiced
>stops (Rohlfs gives: ago, drago, lago, sugo, spiga, briga, segale,
>luogo, lattuga, aguzzo, pagare, segare, pregare, sfogare, affogare,
>fregare, annegare, frugare, intrigare; spada, strada, malgrado,
>contrada, rugiada, contado, scudo, lido, padella, badia, badessa,
>badile, gradire, scodella, gridare, medaglia, stadera, mortadella,
>podesta`, budello, mudare, podere; povero, vescovo, arrivare,
>ricevere, cavezza, ricoverare, rimproverare, sceverare, scovolo).
>As to -s-, it is pronouned voiceless /s/ in asino, cosa, casa, mese,
>fuso, peso, naso, the suffixes -oso, -ese (except cortese, francese,
>marchese, palese, paese), the verbal endings -esi, -isi, -osi, -usi,
>-eso, -iso, -uso.  Voiced /z/ is found in: base, battesimo, bisogno,
>caso, chiesa, crisi, cristianesimo, deserto, dose, fantasia, fase,
>fisica, lasagna, lesina, medesimo, misero, musica, osare, pausa,
>posa, paradiso, rosa, quaresima, quasi, spasimre, sposo, scusare,
>te`si, uso, usare, vaso, ventesimo, viso (from <x>: esame, esatto,
>esempio, esemplare, esiguo, esigere, esercito, esente, eseredare).
 
Unless I'm mistaken (I don't have the volume at hand), Rohlfs is talking
about Tuscan in that passage, not Standard Italian. The two are distinct,
although they match up fairly well for the examples he gives (but not always
across the lexicon: Mod. Florentine /letikare/ vs. It. /litigare/ 'argue,
fight'). In any case, data pulled out of Standard Italian (assuming we can
identify what that is) are not the most felicitous for constructing or
testing theories, given that the Standard was presumably no one's native
language until relatively recently, and even in the far-off days of trying
to derive a standard from Tuscan, that standard was based on literary
models, rather than actual speech, and ultimately was and has been subject
to a good amount of winnowing. [It's of interest how much Tuscan detail
("tutte helle hosine" someone once told me) is absent from Italian.]
 
>According to Rohlfs, the cases of /v/, /d/, /g/ and /z/ (listed in
>approxiamte order of frequency) are not native Tuscan forms, but
>words imported from the north.
 
Yes, Rohlfs says so, but this bit isn't that simple, either. Restructured
voicing of /p t k/ is not lexically consistent within Tuscany. More
importantly, it affects forms which are not northern (e.g. codesto), some
which did not voice in N. Italy or even in Spain (PAUCU > W. Tuscan  /pogo/,
AVICA > W. Tuscan /oga/), and lots of local toponyms, presumably not
borrowed. The latest work on this suggests strongly that surface-level
(allophonic) voicing was once much more widespread in Tuscany than it is
today, and that much of the /p t k/ > /b-v d g/ now found may be the result
of reinterpretation of surface forms during rule competition (gorgia coming
in to compete with voicing). It's still going on.
 
Relevant to the current thread is that /p t k/ and /s/ appear to have been
affected by most of the same complex of rules, i.e. that Tuscan doesn't
provide a good counterexample to the hypothesis that /p t k/ and /s/ are
expected to undergo restructuring en bloc.
 
The gorgia mentioned below does, though, and draws attention to the
expectation that sound change (accepting that introduction of allophony is a
change in sound) will proceed member by member within classes, with nothing
to suggest that it must spread outside the innovating class. It can, of
course, as Corsican /s/ --> [z] along with voicing of /p t k/ shows, but it
needn't be the case.
 
Alto Aragones illustrates this as well with regard to degemination, or at
least did fifty years ago when Badia Margarit was investigating the speech
of Bielsa. Working on memory again, but I seem to recall that in the midst
of the massive degemination that one would expect in that part of the
Romance world, there was maintenance of length not only for the expected
/rr/, but also for /ll/ and /nn/ (and possibly even /mm/, but there were
very few examples, one of which was [tammjen], suspect as a recent, and
perhaps surface-only, assimilation). In any case, Belsetan by that time had
degeminated all of /pp tt kk/, /bb dd gg/, etc, but was hanging on to the
last remnants of /nn/, /ll/, /rr/. Marie-Jose' Dalbera-Stefanaggi has found
similar phenomena in Northern Corsica: liquids and nasals are the last to
lose the possibility of manifesting surface length. In neither type did
degemination of the stops imply (immediate) degemination outside their class.
 
>What *is* native Tuscan is the development -k- > -h- ("gorgia
>toscana"), and also (in a smaller area) -t- > -T- and -p- > -P-.  As
>in the Goidelic lenitions, this also occurs across word boundaries.
>To the south of Tuscany, an equally "sandhinista" area is Lazio (as
>well as Corsica and Sardinia), but this time the parallel is with
>Brythonic (-p- > -b- [here we can distinguish between Northern
>imports and local lenitions], -t- > -d-, -k- > -g-).  Apparently -s-
>participates in Corsica (/u zale/ "the salt"), but I'm not sure about
>Lazio.  There is no "aspiration" of /s/ in Tuscany, whatever that
>might mean.  So these *are* counterexamples.
 
Yes. I think Lazio is typically [s], but the voicing of /p t k/ is extensive
enough to cause spelling problems a` la <tudor> ~ <tutor> in Am. E.
 
>However, the Eastern Romance non-lenition (south of La Spezia-Rimini)
>applies both to the stops and to -s-.  Of course the imbalance in the
>system (3/4-way for the stops /d/, [/dd/,] /t/, /tt/, 2-way for the
>sibilant /s/, /ss/) may have favoured the influx of northern words
>containing /z/.
 
Maybe. But there's still the gap of no /zz/, and no phonologically "breve"
counterpart of long palatal laterals and nasals, i.e. no *[aljo] possible to
contrast with [alj:o] 'garlic', no *[onji] can contrast with [onj:i] 'each'
(apologies for the fake IPA).
 
Tom Cravens
University of Wisconsin-Madison
cravens at macc.wisc.edu
 
>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl
>Amsterdam