Romance philology.

[Rankin, Robert L]

It would probably be best for us to take our Romanistics off the Siouan
list, I guess.  The bottom line is, however, that there is no way one can
take Latin 'ambulare' and make all the vowels, n's and l's and clusters come
out regularly to derive andare, andar, amnar, anar, aner, aller, umbla and
so forth.  The result should be rather similar to 'fabulare' (Sp. hablar,
Pt. falar), but with the added m.  Doesn't happen.

Like Blair, I'd want to confirm that Rm. umbla was actually inherited and
not a product of Latinizing trends in recent times.  The form cited by
Corominas, imnare, actually looks to me to be a more likely popular
development.  Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the dialect term despite
2 yrs there doing dialect phonology.  I'm not doubting its existence though.
BTW, I was an RA for Joan Corominas back in 1961-2 at Chicago, but I
couldn't take the drudgery and dropped it.   8-)

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: BARudes at aol.com [mailto:BARudes at aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2002 12:06 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Oooops!


Alan,

Most of my reference works on Romanian and Rheto-Romance are at my
university
office, whereas I am at home until Friday.  I will give you a more detailed
response then.  Meanwhile, here is what the Dictionarul Explicativ al Limbii

Roma^ne (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Roma^nia, 1975)
has to say on the subject of the Romanian forms:

Page 993: Umbla, umblu, v. I. Intranz. I.1. A se deplasa dintr-un loc in
altui (to move from one place to another); a merge (to go); ... [Var. :
(inv.
si pop. (learned and local) i^mbla vb. 1] - Lat. ambulare].

If I remember correctly, the dialectal form i^mnare (which by the way is a
noun, not an infinitive since Latin infinitives became Romanian nouns
(compare Romanian avere 'possessions' and French avoir 'have'); infinitives
in Romanian are rare (normally found only after forms of the verb a putea
'be
able' in the standard dialect) and lack the infinitive suffix of Latin
(Proto-Romance)) is a regular, dialect internal development (assimilation),
of  umbla/i^mbla 'go, move' .  Thus, the Romanian forms can be derived
directly from ambulare without any intermediate Proto-Romance form *amDlare.

I also believe (but will have to check) that there is some question about
whether this verb was inherited directly from Proto-Romance or is a later
(learned) addition to the language.

I will get back to you on the Rheto-Romance forms.

Blair