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Christophe wrote:
> Actually, the French final -e is silent, and is the natural evolution
of -o.
> There never was an ending added to the first person. Only the -o evolved
slowly
> into -@ and then was lost while it never ceased to be written (in fact, it
did
> under the pen of some writers until it was reestablished when the
orthography
> was standardised, but this is purely graphical. It never marked a special
> pronunciation which came back to life). French people never felt a problem
that
> 1s and 2s became homophonous, since subjects were already mandatory by
then.
Some historical linguists (amongst them there was the Italian dialectologist
Rohlfs) suggested the ending -e was actualy pronounced, but its origin
should not be tracked back to the Latin ending -o, which actually
disappeared in French (-U and -O merged and both started to be left out
quite early). Its source could be found in a [@] added at the end of verbs
as _je entre_, _je parle_ where the normal process (from VL _intro_ VL
_paràbolo_ > *parlo) would have led to unallowed final clusters: je entr, je
parl. This sound was later reanalysed as a 1s marker and extended to all
verbs. The fact that the -e was actually pronounced is witnessed by _je
chante_, where the _t_ is pronounced... IIRC, at least. If the -e had not be
pronounced, we'd get [SA~], I suppose; this word is however written _chant_
< VL CANTO _song_ = CANTO _I sing_... Two different reflexes for two
omophone words suggest a development differing from the linear one.
> > Wanna listen some Lombard? It's a muribund language (I am one of the
> > very
> > few 18yrs olders who actually can speak it), but a Lombard singer from
> > a
> > nearby village, Davide Bernasconi with his 'Van de Sfroos band' (_vann
> > de
> > sfros_ means 'smugglers'- a typical job on the Swiss border),
>
> Funny, "Van de Sfroos" could be a Dutch last name :))) .
Yup... that's not the traditional orthography (the Milanese one): 'sfros' in
Milan is pronounced [sfru:z], while on the west shore of the Lake Como it's
[sfro:s], rendered in this reformed spelling by _sfroos_. The traditional
system is for many quite difficult to master, but it mainly relies on
phonology- the many reformed orthographies aim at represent the phonetic
surface of words, not the phonemes. As for me, I prefer the traditional
system;-)
> I looked at the site, and found in the "Audio" part a song ("Ventanas" I
think)
> which didn't sound Italian at all to me :)) . Was it Lombard?
The Western Lombard dialect of Tremezzo, to be precise, on the Lake Como.
>Well, it does
> sound strange (especially the occasional initial [Sm]
yup... it's typical of some regions of Lombardy, especially some rural
areas, the Lake Como, Southern Switzerland (btw, the Swiss tv is the only
one to occasionally broadcast in Lombard...).
and I even heard a
[x] or
> [G] somewhere :))) ).
No, that's probably just an impression... Well, if you regard Western
Lombard as a strange language, then you ought to listen to Eastern Lombard
(are there other Romance languages with a phoneme [h]?), Piedmontese,
Ligurian, Aemilian...
> There's no mutual intelligibility with standard
> Italian I
> suppose :)) .
Just to a limited extent, I suppose.
Luca