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On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 09:42:45AM +0000, Adam Walker wrote: > > It, like many New World loans into Spanish got caught by the same Romance > rule that transformed William into Guillermo. Initial or intervocalic > w-sounds get hardened to gw. /awakatl/ > /agwakate/. It happened to > Germanic loans, it happened to Arabic loans, it hapened to Amerind loans and > its still active today. It wasn't hard to hear Hispanics in the Dallas > area, many of whom are L2 speakers of English, convert the W at the > beginning of English words and names to Gw. Yeah. It's pretty common in some dialects to substitute /gw/ for /w/ in words such as <huevo>, <huérfano>, etc.; so it's not at all confined to loans from outside Spanish. > > Adam > > >From: "Barry Garcia" <barry_garcia@hidden.email> > >Reply-To: romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com > >To: romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com > >Subject: Re: [romanceconlang] some food terms > >Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 21:22:32 -0700 > > > >Eric Christopherson writes: > > > > ><aguacate> IS the Spanish word. I'm not sure where we got <avocado> from. > > >(It certainly sounds Spanish... maybe it's an older form that was > > >supplanted?) I'm aware that our English word comes from the same source, but I just wonder how it got its distinct shape in English. > > > >Apparently it *is* derived from aguacate. Aguacate itself is derived from > >the Nahuatl "Ahuacatl". > > > >I think I may change the Montreiano form to "auacate" since the Nahuatl > >form suggests the gu is really /w/ instead of /g/ (we dont often discuss > >avocados in my Spanish classes, so i've not had a chance to hear it > >pronounced :)). That is correct. Nahuatl had/has no voiced plosives (that I'm aware of at least, though dialects may differ); in earlier transcription of the language, <gu> and <hu> were used interchangeably for /w/ before a vowel. <uh> actually stands for /w/ before a consonant, such as in the name <Cuauhtémoc> /kwaw"temok/. -- Eric Christopherson, a.k.a. Contrarian Conlanger Rakko ^_^